10 Teen Titans Cosplay That Look Just Like The Comics | CBR – CBR – Comic Book Resources

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Over the years, there have been many characters that were teammates under the Teen Titans moniker, including Wonder Girl to Kid Flash, but the most famous version of the group seems to have been put together in the 1980s:Cyborg, Raven, Starfire, Beast Boy, and the ever-present Robin as the defacto leader.

This version of the team has gained legions of fans thanks toCartoon Network's animated series from the 2000s, itsTeen Titans Go spinoff, and DC Universe's live-action Titans series. Naturally, these fans like to honor their favorite members of the team by dressing up as them, often, naturally, in groups.

RELATED:Teen Titans: The Team's 10 Strongest Members, Ranked

Today, we're sharing some of our favorite Teen Titans cosplayers out there, who look like they've stepped right out from the pages of the comics. And remember, because a picture can still tell a thousand words, beware of spoilers.

Since the beginning, there's usually been a Robin on the Teen Titans team. Sure, they haven't always been the same Robin, but there's usually some form of Robin. This cosplayerseems to be channeling Damian Wayne, who was notably "Robin V" during the Post-Rebirth era.

This photo appears to be taken at the Gold Coast Convention and Exhibition Centre and Instagram user cosplay.k.i.n.g, who shared the photo creditsrosequincosplay for photography.

Of course, Robin doesn't always stay Batman's elfish, little sidekick. After all, he's practically the leader of the Titans. So, we sometimes see him progress into his older alter-ego, Nightwing. Usually, this isDick Grayson's alter-ego, but, just like "Robin," other characters sometimes take up the moniker.

Instragram userjustwhelmed_cosplayshared this photo for "Titans Tuesday," channeling Dick Grayson, at least according to the hashtags, creditingaderriere . for the photo.

In this shoot, we see cosplayers posing as Beast Boy, a green shapeshifter who has the power to transform into various animals, here seemingly turning into a dragon, and Terra, who has power over the element of earth, hanging out together. The two had something of a relationship in the original comics...until it turned out that Terra was an evil mole out to betray the Titans all along. Of course, some fans prefer to ignore that little detail...

RELATED:Teen Titans: The 5 Most Powerful Members (& The 5 Least Powerful)

Instagram userjupiter.cosplayshared this photo, withBeast Boy being played byzack.wilkesand Terra being played byjupiter.cosplay, with photography fromeric_manix_photography.

In this cosplay shoot, we see the five famous Titans dressed like they are getting ready for class or maybe just a casual hang-out.

Instagram userpdxacrylickshared this photo, creditingdavidvelezphotographyfor photography and sending a shout-out to _picolo(artist Gabriel Picolo, whose known for his "casual" artwork of the team). Rounding out the rest of the cast areRobin, played bymyherozak, Raven, played byattackonmorgan, and Cyborg, played byemceecosplay.

Gabriel Picolo's work has inspired quite a few fans, it seems. In this piece, we see Robin, Beast Boy, Starfire, and Raven all hanging about with a special guest: Statfire's sister. Blackfire. The two sisters aren't exactly the best of friends, what with Blackfire having sold Starfire into slavery and stealing her throne. Of course, some versions aren't as bad as others, so hopefully, they're channeling one of those less evil versions of Blackfire...or else she is probably up to something...

Instagram groupmagic_mo_cosplayshared this photo of the Titans hanging out, once again sending their thanks to _picolofor his work.

Princess Koriand'r, better known as Starfire, is one of the strongest characters on the team, especially considering she was trained by warlords since she was young. Despite this, she tends to be one of the more affectionate and nicer Titans, usually showing support to her teammates. In this post, we see a glimpse of her power as she lifts Beast Boy up with just one arm..giving him some "support" in another sense of the word.

RELATED:Teen Titans: Every Batman Easter Egg in the Beloved Animated Series

Instagram groupsassygills.cosplayshared this photo, thankinglaura_michele235for support..

Of course, Starfire is more than just brawn...she has the power to control and manipulate ultraviolet radiation, creating powerful blasts and beams. You can tell someone is going to be in trouble when her eyes start to glow green (except the versions where her eyes are always monochromatic.)

Instagram useryohanixshared this photo of Starfire, also known as "Estelar" in the Spanish-speaking fandom, showcasing her ultraviolet powers.

Raven is a powerful empath with a plethora of magical and supernatural abilities. But all that power comes at the cost ofemotional restraint, something Raven keeps control of with a lot of meditating, using her famous spell, "Azarath Metrion Zinthos," as a mantra. Of course, with her great powers, she tends to float during these periods of reflection. And this cosplayer decided to recreate Raven's famous meditation pose, complete with her floating in the air!

Instagram usermissbmarie24shared this photo, adding the quote,"My powers are driven by emotion. The more you feel, the more energy you unleash,"also crediting nicksiegristfor photography.

In this photo, three of the Titans are showing off their jackets: Nightwing, Starfire, and Cyborg. It might not be obvious at first glance but the jacket Starfire is wearing seems to be based on one Robin is sometimes seen wearing in artwork.

Instagram userssuzukichan_cosplay _the_night_wing. and rfjcosplay1986are credited as the models in the photo, shared bywonderfulworldofcosplay, withprettythingsandmoodswingscredited as the photographer.

The Titans are first and foremost a superhero team, so let's end with a photo with the team (Beast Boy, Starfire, Raven, Nightwing, and Cyborg) looking like they're about to attack, complete with them showing off some of their weapons. There's a lot of attention to detail...they even managed to get Nightwing's eyes looking pure white.

Instagram usergrumpy_dragon_cosplayshared this photo of aTitans group from the LA Comic-Con, adding thatportraits.n.cosplaytook the photo.

NEXT:10 Best Superhero HQs, Ranked

NextWhich Dragon Ball Z Character Are You Based On Your Astrology Type?

Hello, my name is John Witiw, and you may remember me as a writer for Viral Pirate, Frontrunner Magazine, or even NTD Television, but now I'm here for CBR!

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10 Teen Titans Cosplay That Look Just Like The Comics | CBR - CBR - Comic Book Resources

"Why Fish Don’t Exist" explores eugenics in the US, a Hawaiian murder plot, and the meaning of life – Salon

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"Invisibilia" co-creator, "Radiolab" contributor, and NPR reporter Lulu Miller had her first existential crisis at age 7 when she asked her father about the meaning of life. Her world was forever rearranged by his cheery, but to her,bleak response: "Nothing!"

Perhaps armed with this outlook, Miller has continued to seek something that would offer hope or understanding of howothers navigatethe world. Through her reporting, she'soften delved intoscience todecode aspects of human nature, but it took an almost unbelievable story to inspire her first non-fiction book, "Why Fish Don't Exist: A Tale of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life" (April 14, Simon & Schuster).This is no ordinary fish tale, but instead relates the real-life story of a 19th-century American ichthyologist, a possible murder cover-up, and the horrifying reality of eugenics in America.

David Starr Jordan had spent his life discovering new species of fish, which he then threw in a jar along with a tin tag giving all necessary identifying information. These jars were stacked high at Stanford University when the 1906 earthquake hit, bringing his catch of the decades to a shattering end. Or it would have been for a lesser man. Undaunted, Jordan took needle and thread and began to stitch the tin tags directly onto as many fish as his memory could match.

Was it a Herculean task or a Sisyphean one? Miller found herself intrigued with this fishy folly and began to trace Jordan's life to see if she could unlock the mysteries of what could make such a man impervious to even the greatest setbacks. Whence came his unshakeable faith that he could succeed in the face of overwhelming disaster? Did this man of science know of a meaning other than "Nothing"?

What she discovered at first was charming an intellectual obsessed with learning the names of stars, wildflowers, and later as an adult, marine life. Jordan also experienced multiple tragedies of losing family members close to him, but always remained unfazed. He eventually became the first president of Stanford University and a vocal leader of the eugenics movement, even writing publications about genetic cleansing.

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It's a wild ride, with Miller imbuing suspense into this story from a bygone era as each revelation about Jordan becomes more appalling than the last.

Along the way, Miller also shares her own personal journey from attempting suicide, and losing and rediscovering love, to finding somesense in her own life through a surprising fish-inspired philosophy(fish-losophy?) that resulted from her research.How she makes peace with the idea of a man who haddone both marvelous and monstrousthings involves the book'scoup de grce that upends our idea of what fish (and we)are in the grand scheme of things.

In a wide-ranging interview with Salon, Miller discussed it all, from the aquatic to the existential. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

I was unfamiliar with David Starr Jordan. When you were looking into him, was it purely because you found this person interesting or did you know all along that there was some sort of story there?

I truly knew nothing. I had heard this little anecdote about the earthquake and how after the earthquake, whoever was in charge of the fish started sewing the label on. So I just knew that someone reacted to destruction in this really confident, almost brazen way. I had no idea who that person was.

And then I literally just wanted to write a pristine little one-page essay of like, man versus chaos, a battle of the little guy against all of chaos. I imagined it would just be a parable like, what was his end? Did he end well? Or did he end poorly? It was an almost foolishly simple question. And then I started to learn about him, and pretty early on just from Google I could see, oh, okay, he became a eugenicist. But I didn't know the extent. I think there's kind of this narrative of, "Well many a decent scientist became a eugenicist in that era. It was just an accident of science, you know, like a misstep." I was like, okay, there's definitely some darkness and some folly but it didn't show the hand of how passionately he was a eugenicist and how much he did for the movement. Then I had no clue about the murder involvement whatever, I had no clue about how interpersonally violent he could get, so those were truly surprises that came the more and more I read about him.

Yeah, that's a lot.

It really spiraled when I saw his fat, giant memoir. Just for me reading it, I started out charmed. I was like, totally he's a loner, he loves nature, he's getting taunted ... and ugh, I love him. And then it was just, like, ugh just dark. It just got so bad.

Jordan's instructor Louis Agassiz, the renowned naturalist, as soon as I started reading his ladder hierarchy theory, it started making me cringe that idea that there's a moral component,a moral hierarchy to the natural world and even among humans. Of course this leads eventually to various ideas of eugenics that people like Jordan was embracing. Was it obvious, this connection of even how they were talking about the value of marine life that it also relates to the waypeople are classified and treated today?

Right, I think what happened for me was I realized, "Oh, wow, this guy was involved in eugenics." I got to learn about the eugenics movement, and how it really got going here. That was the next discovery, of how much a part of American history that was and how popular it was and how the Nazis were putting up posters that said, "We don't stand alone," with an American flag on it because we passed the [eugenics] laws first. So then I had my mini like, "Oh my God, we are dirty with this history. Why did I not know that?!"

And then, I still had the sense that this is past, that we've moved past those policies. But I was living in Charlottesville for almost 10 years, and and we're very close to the park where the Unite the Right rally went down. That morning, short buses full of these young and it wasn't old people young men with Nazi flags and the swastikas on shields, were parking in our lawn. Literally they are saying, "It's just a matter of science that certain races are better." They're using the same argument.

To not see that you'd have to be blind, but then just all the insidious ways and even the reporting on the coronavirus when it was just happening in Wuhan. No one cared about the effects of the isolation on the people living there. These aren't people with the same emotional lives to investigate how they're impacted. It was seen only as this blight, just this disease that's being either handled or not. Or today how people who are disabled are in many states . . . they are being just casually, soberly considered to have less valuable lives, that they shouldn't be the ones getting ventilators.

We think we're passing in the hierarchy, the moral hierarchy, but we're not. There are these decisions everywhere, left and right. You hear it in the news, you see it in policy every day where we're still making this failure of logic, where we still believe there are little moral hierarchies. It's so alive. And that's what's been really astounding to me.

The title of the book, while I know it's very irritating to people in certain ways what do you mean, fish don't exist? the point is "fish" is symptomatic of a false hierarchy, a lower rung that I'm saying doesn't exist. And that is the kind of slip of language and slip of logic that we're making all the time with people. It's cartoonish and easier to talk about in fish, but . . . we're not past it and it really could be dangerous.

You explain it fairly simply in the book, but how did you get to the point of revelation that "fish" doesn't exist as a category of animal, of understanding what the cladists were proposing? It was a radical idea that upset over a century of how we viewed the natural order of the world, and honestly how many people still think. Fish are fish, or so we assume.

Mostly the way in was Carol Yoon's beautiful book, which is "Naming Nature." She was the perfect person to explain it because she lived through the revolution in science. She was literally a biology major and then the cladists came into her classroom, pointing out these truths, like the fact that fish don't exist. And so I just remember reading that book, right as I was learning about David Starr Jordan and kind of seeing his story darken. I thought, "Oh my god, this is such a cool poetic justice for the universe to take away his fish." I remember having this little part of me that still craves meaning, like the little girl on the deck with my dad, that still wants cosmic justice for a bad guy, to watch science itself do him in. There was something that felt like really thrilling and important to me, in a way that I still have trouble articulating, but it felt like, "Oh my god, every now and then, chaos itself spits out a parable for heathens. Every now and then we actually get moral instruction that's even about our rules; it's about chaos. There was something that just felt like, "Oh my god I've stumbled onto the coolest, epic parable for heathens." I felt really thrilled.

But then to truly understand it, took me years, andI had all these, moments of like, "But then what are they?" It took a lot of clumsy conversations with scientists and a lot of doodles on folders of me trying to draw and just make it simpler. It took a lot of slow unscrewing of my own logic, and that was slow. It was slow to get there but but it is cool. I see. Like, do you think do you believe fish as a category doesn't exist?

Oh, yes I wish there was a way to still say "fish" but acknowledge that is not a category like, "phish," but unfortunately, there's already a band named Phish that starts with a "P." But "phish"would stand for "phony fish." It would be helpful.

Oh my god I love that. I love that. Maybe we could just call it that. PETA suggested calling them sea kittens. I like "phony fish." I might borrow that from you and credit you. But it's like, "Sure, you can still call [fish]that. It's just not scientifically accurate. But of course, you can call them that."

You weave in your own personal experiences and trying to find meaning in the book. There's something that I really identified with, which was having this sort of existential crisis when you're in childhood. . . . You pinpoint when your father told you that nothing matters in life. It's all meaningless. It's the worst epiphany ever. Do you recall what your life was like before that moment? How you viewed life before that conversation?

That felt like a shock to me. I must have just intuitively thought that there was meaning or purpose to life . . . just like I marched off to nursery school each morning; we must be marching into life with a purpose. I do remember the Church of the Latter Day Saints commercials that were big in the '80s. It was like, cute little mishap and then at the end, some sort of smile and coming together and then it would be like, "Join the church of Latter Day Saints that discovered the purpose of life." It was like each of them ended with this promise that if you joined, you'd get it.

I think I pictured the meaning or the purpose of life like this little fortune cookie fortune that if you ask the right person or were in the right place, you would learn it and then you'd be okay. You'd be armed with this magical thing to warm all the confusion. I definitelyhad this sense that there was a meaning that was maybe hard to articulate or hard to find out but that it was there. And so for my dad to just so nakedly and completely saying no, and that everyone else who tells you there is, is lying or trying to comfort themselves. It did feel like a blow. I must have thought that there was some huge universal point to it all.

I could see any other number of children going through this conversation with their father and not taking it in like you did. Their illusions wouldn't be shattered despite what an authority was telling them. David Starr Jordan, he had this way of viewing life with these illusions that he embraced and allowed him to forge ahead. What is it in people that you think are make them able to embrace illusions versus people who believe otherwise?

I think a lot goes into it. I do believe that most of us do believe that evolution hasgiven all of us that"gift" of some degree of delusion. Because I do think, with consciousness, if we didn't get a little dash of that with awareness, without some sense of optimism or delusion, we would just be completely paralyzed. So I do think like, we all have that ability just to get through our day, just to even block out the fact that we're all going to die. Like, how else do put on our pajamas or make the coffee?

I don't know, but I think that there's just a scale of how much we let ourselves give in and probably all kinds of things go into how much we let ourselves give in. So probably for me being surrounded by a parent, who is joyfully, devilishly wanting, forcing me to look at the bleakness every morning probably has reared me as someone who's more looking at a darker, more accurate worldview. Whereas if you're constantly sunny and things work out for you, and that optimism, that delusion keeps working for you, you're probably going to keep doing it. Whereas I can imagine if you embrace some form of delusion in yourself or how things work, and then you got humiliated by it, you might be wary of it.

Maybe that's too wishy-washy, but I do think it's like we all have a little [delusion]. And then our life determines how much we're going to hold onto it. And I do think there are some people who are just intuitively more self-deluded. Like David Starr Jordan even talks about how he always had a shield of optimism, and it was so strange and noticeable that people commented on it all throughout his life. So I think maybe he was just spat out that way. Yeah. And being like a white man, relatively well-connected white man, and in the 1800s probably helped reinforce that vision.

Do you think that he might be a sociopath because of that and how easily he lies about everything?There are hints and strong suspicions of murder and there's the violence Jordan advocates.

I didn't go that far because the way he behaves I see as far more common. But he did seem to have a shockingly small amount of remorse. Remorse was utterly un-findable in his autobiography. Every hint of self-deprecation is a backdoor brag, like, "I lost the prize because I was I was so ethical," or because "I was so magnanimous, I wanted a poorer student to win the money." Maybe that that goes as far as a sociopath but I feel like I've encountered people like him who don't care much about the effect that they may have on other people. Why should they if there's not cosmic justice? Why not?

You see a lot of people sometimes getting ahead and have never been really punished for their sins because maybe actually karma and cosmic justice don't really exist, and that unfortunately is the truth of our world. We have all these religions telling us it does exist to spook us into being better. Actually, I think that's one of the great purposes of religion.

Returning to your part, what were the challenges of doing such a personal story for yourself? You go over experiences and actions that most people keep under wraps, not just in the book, but then you recorded an audiobook. So you had to narrate these secrets in your own life out loud.

There's two engineers there's the producer on the phone and then the sound guy at the studio here in Chicago where I was recording it and I'm reading the most naked five paragraphs about myself in the third chapter where I'm like, "Ah, yes, here's my depression, suicide, bullied sister, cheating," really all in three pages.

And it was like, "Wow, I'm just doing it. I'm putting this out there." The cheating and also the suicide, those aren't things I really talk about with that many people. It is a little scary.

In the process of writing and editing, you have to revisit the same ideas over and over and over again to refine them. So in some ways, did that make it more comfortable for you after a while because you're owning it?

Yeah, actually, I do think time helps. In the original pitch of this book, I had no idea I was going into this stuff . . . but my editor was just like, "This is interesting material but why do you care about this guy?" So I did some real crappy free-writing around it, and then all this stuff came out. It was years of work.

Also, in my work, a lot of the interviews I do is asking people to share huge parts of themselves and I think that I'm healed by that. I know listeners are healed by people being that vulnerable, so maybe it's time for me to do it too. But it is scary. It's given me new compassion for people that I just call up and have them feel really dark stuff.

I love Kate Samworth's scratchboard illustrations that she does with, of all things, a sewing needle. So when did you decide that you wanted this visual component for each chapter? How did that collaboration come about?

From the moment I set out to write what I thought was an essay, in my head I had this picture of man versus chaos man holding a sewing needle toa tornado of chaos. I wanted readers to see that because I wanted them to understand how I was seeing his story as this almost like Odysseus putting the stakes in the giant, that kind of battle. It just was always in my head that readers might need the visual so they could understand metaphorically what what I was seeing in this otherwise seemingly arcane tale.

When I pitched the book, I wanted her to do it. I've known her work for a long time and she works in all forms these wild oil paints, stop animation, and watercolor. But I'd seen on her Instagram these little scratch drawings and they just reminded me of fairy tale books and where each story gets one drawing. You fall into it as a little kid at the beginning and you don't know why there's like a key and a lion, but you want to read it to find out. Then you go back [to look at the picture]. I saw his story as an epic and I wanted to heighten that quality . . . and to play up the parable quality.

You've been doing a lot of publicity for this book, but in your regular everyday life, do you think about David Starr Jordan or fish not being fish?

I do think about fish not being fish a lot, a lot with reporting, just in terms of like, "Who am I going to? Who's my first impulse of who to include in the story? Who am I putting on the hierarchy towards the top as experts? Do I need to immediately rethink that? Do I need to include a different kind of voice? Do I have a bias?" I can't really see it because that's the problem with a blind spot or with an assumption; it's so basic you don't even think it's a bias you need to question but I think it's something that increasingly, my ears are pricked to what categories are people asserting.

This is a small example, but the Lynchburg facility, the colony where Carrie Buck was sterilized was in operation until exactly a week ago. Over 100 years later, the last person finally left because COVID hastened it. At first I was like, "Oh, this is such a happy story. This bad place, finally, no one has to live there, the epicenter of eugenics." But then I thought, "But where are they going? Is a group home better? What is the freedom?" So just to even think about like the category of freedom or a better place. Is it really? That's maybe too convoluted, but yeah, I think "Are fish, fish?" is something that has made me hopefully a better reporter, a little more a little more skeptical and just having curiosity about about the truth of categories and about the people who are stuck in them.

As for David Starr Jordan, I think he's complicated. I think about him in this moment, actually, because he'd be the kind of person who would probably react with creativity. He was good at that, even though he used it for evil. He was really creative in the face of utter destruction. He didn't spend a lot of time looking back. And so I think like, Are there parts of him that I actually do want to be more like? Are there parts of him to emulate?

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"Why Fish Don't Exist" explores eugenics in the US, a Hawaiian murder plot, and the meaning of life - Salon

History Shows That When Prejudice Overrides Science, Public Health Is at Risk – TIME

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Toward the end of the 19th century, the superintendent of Georgias State Asylum, T.O. Powell, developed a theory to explain rising numbers of tuberculosis and insanity cases among the states African American population. The problem, he asserted, was that Emancipation eliminated the slave systems healthful effects a remarkably ahistorical claim that ignored not only slaverys brutality but also a similar post-war epidemic in white people.

As his racist ideas informed public-health efforts, the consequences reached far beyond the dangers to his charges at the asylum. Today, as the world faces the COVID-19 pandemic, Powells story is a cautionary tale about the consequences of allowing prejudice to override the lessons of science. In an era when essential workers of color are among the least paid and protected, when many of Americas national leaders declare viruses foreign (feeding a spike in anti-Asian violence), and when shocking recent data shows that African Americans are disproportionately dying from the epidemic (making up more than 70% of Chicagos deaths, for example), Powells choices should strike us as frighteningly familiar.

Heres how it played out in Georgia. After making his pro-slavery claims about African Americans health, Powell went on to boost his antebellum-inspired ideas with a simplistic understanding of heredity, which he credited with creating 90% of the cases of insanity within asylums. At a southern professional meeting in 1895, Powell and his fellow superintendents asked themselves: Has Emancipation Been Prejudicial to the Negro? and answered this remarkable query with a resounding YES!!! Two years later, Powell was elected President of the American Medico-Psychological Association, giving him a national platform to spread his attitudes. Powell would soon ally these fatal ideas with new eugenics technologies, including sterilization of his female patients, who were deemed morally unfit.

Crucially, Powells eugenic ideals left him ill-equipped to handle the public-health emergencies raging within his own institution. In his fascination with heredity, he ignored the medical revolution ushered in by the germ theory of disease, particularly Edward Kochs discovery of the tubercle bacillus in 1882a lethal, willful ignorance. Powells yearly reports documented a range of diseases in his asylum that had far less to do with heredity and far more to do with the epidemic conditions created there by his own policies. TB spread rapidly through the air especially in the Colored Building with its 900 black patients. The crowded conditions that allowed that spread were his primary responsibility in a job that he himself called lunacy administration. His patients were also suffering from pellagra from their starvation diet, as the U.S. Public Health Service would later prove.

Adding insult to injury, Powells writing boosted the idea that mental illnesses and TB were the result of degenerate populations too morally depraved or unmanly to survive. When Powell died in 1907, he was proclaimed Georgias greatest philanthropist.

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Fed by a triumphant Jim Crow and a new wave of imperialism, white supremacists continued to promote racist theories of tuberculosis. These grew quickly into such deadly libels as Powell had espoused. Frederick Hoffmans Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro and Rudolph Matas The Surgical Peculiarities of the American Negro (both published in 1896) became standard medical texts in the new century. In the early 20th century, the American eugenics movement also fed these racist libels from its base at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island, funded by the Carnegie Institution and supported by major American universities in the years before Hitlers Nazi Party made the consequences of eugenics all too clear in its program of mass extermination.

Comparing Powells story to the novel coronavirus might sound extreme. But 1.5 million people (as of the end of 2017), disproportionately people of color, are incarcerated in crowded cells in U.S. jails and prisons and an average of more than 50,000 people per day are detained in immigration centers. The virus has already begun its spread for inmates and detainees in conditions of forced proximity with little sanitation. Meanwhile, New Yorks Governor and New York Citys Mayor are left pleading the federal government for help against the rising death rates in the multicultural and international metropolis; even within the city, the areas hit hardest are those with high immigrant, Hispanic and African American populations. And we havent yet seen the virus really hit those countries underdeveloped for centuries by conquest and colonialism.

Allowing these forces to play themselves out is one choice. It is called eugenics, fed by both historic racist animosities and willed ignorance. But there are always better options. On the side of public health in Georgia, African Americans in Atlanta in the early 20th century declared that germs have no color line and tracked TB through neighborhoods, traced contacts, opened clinics, and educated their people on prevention and treatment.

Surely today we should chose the second set of practices over the first. But will we?

Mab Segrest is the author of ADMINISTRATIONS OF LUNACY: Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum, available now from the New Press.

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History Shows That When Prejudice Overrides Science, Public Health Is at Risk - TIME

The Police State, Livestock Breeding and Web 2.0: Research by 3 Duke Professors – Duke Today

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Bold thinking is an essential part of Dukes approach to scholarship, and three ongoing projects show the unexpected results.

Adriane Lentz-Smith, Gabriel Rosenberg, and Aarthi Vadde have been named 202021 National Humanities Center Fellows. They will spend a year away from their regular teaching duties as resident scholars at the Research Triangle Parkbased center, researching and writing new books. Chosen from 673 applicants, they join 30 other humanists from the U.S. and four foreign countries working in 18 different disciplines.

Here are the books theyre working on.

In 1985, a Black San Diego resident named Sagon Penn was pulled over by the police. The encounter quickly turned violent. Fearing for his life, Penn shot and killed one officer while wounding another and a civilian who was riding with them.

Penn was charged with murder, and his trial highlighted the rampant racial tensions of 1980s southern California, which would explode with the assault of Rodney King six years later. Though he was eventually acquitted, Penns life deteriorated. He was later arrested on charges of domestic abuse, among other things, and, in 2002, he committed suicide.

Adriane Lentz-Smith, associate professor of History

The basic story itself is riveting and heartbreaking, said Adriane Lentz-Smith, whose project, The Slow Death of Sagon Penn: State Violence and the Twilight of Civil Rights, centers around the case. It has you think about the ways in which state violence becomes more personalized types of violence and travels throughout a community, touching all kinds of folks.

By writing about Penns life in the era of Black Lives Matter, Lentz-Smith, an associate professor of History, hopes to provide historical context to now familiar debates about policing and racism. The Civil Rights Movement didnt begin with Brown vs. Board nor end with the Voting Rights Act, she said. She will use Penns experience to connect individual victims of state violence to the national history of policing, border policies and white supremacy, showing how the struggles of the Civil Rights Movement continue today.

Approaching the topic this way also allows Lentz-Smith to humanize the issues. When you make it not an abstract debate, but a life that we see destroyed, that takes his loved ones and his children with it to see it as tragedy, and not just an individual tragedy but Americas that seems significant, she said.

Gabriel Rosenberg, associate professor of Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies

According to Gabriel Rosenberg, associate professor of Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies, if you want to understand why eugenics and race science were widely popular in the United States in the early 20th century, you cant just look at intellectual debates over the theorys scientific merits (or lack thereof). The actual answer, he says, can only be found on farms.

There are really intriguing and interesting institutional ties between eugenic organizations and the livestock breeding industry, Rosenberg explained. This is a well-known empirical fact about the history of eugenics, but its often sidelined as a peculiarity.

Rosenberg aims to make it central, because thats what it was at the time. In the early 1900s, most Americans lived in rural areas, surrounded by farm animals. In fact, in 1900, the nations livestock was worth more than the countrys railroads combined. The only asset worth more at the time was land.

As a result, eugenics the practice of selectively mating people with specific hereditary traits was a familiar idea, Rosenberg argues. Many accepted the theory because it mirrored the way they bred their livestock. All that was needed was to apply the same logic to humans with horrific consequences.

By placing farming practices into the history of eugenics, Rosenberg is also making broader arguments about the forces shaping our world. The practice of making meat at these truly world historical levels is reformulating human social relations with each other, fundamentally restructuring human societies, he said. Were creating a new ecology that confines and conditions our own social relations. In other words, the supply chains and husbandry practices that define how we treat animals and nature also define how we treat ourselves.

Is fan fiction a form of literary criticism? Should people who love literature care about self-published novels, Instagram poetry or the millions of words written, read and shared on digital platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr or Reddit?

Aarthi Vadde, associate professor of English

By turning to popular digital forms of writing, associate professor of English Aarthi Vadde is taking questions typically asked by scholars of Internet culture and examining them with a literary lens. The new perspective raises the very question of what makes writing literary, asking what impact its form and venue of publication have even the device on which its read.

Vadde points out that while curling up with a good book is still many readers ideal way to consume literature, its not the predominant mode of reading in the 21st century. I didnt feel like enough people were talking about the actual sociological circumstances of the way literature is consumed today, Vadde said. You cant assume that people are reading the physical book. And if they are reading the physical book, you still have to take into account the ecology that the book exists in.

That ecology is defined by the Internet. We spend most of our reading time on digital devices, reading not just news articles and e-books, but social media posts, reviews and other kinds of everyday writing. And writing them ourselves. Writing is eclipsing reading as a literacy skill, Vadde said. Its so important to write in all areas of work and play these days. Thats something that is very different than the old idea of the reader and writer having a very clear boundary between them.

Titled We the Platform: Contemporary Literature after Web 2.0, Vaddes project examines how the social web is changing the relationship between literature and literacy, or the broader understanding of how people read and write today. She will examine works of literature that probe the conditions of reading and writing, make creative use of digital platforms and reflect upon the computing technologies shaping our interaction with all kinds of art, including Teju Coles Twitter fiction, Jarett Kobeks self-published satire I Hate the Internet and more.

In doing so, Vadde will analyze how the principles and rhetoric of Web 2.0, alongside its tech, influence the form and circulation of literature.

Learning to use digital tools is not enough, she said. Humanists should more pointedly address the philosophies behind those tools. We the Platform will show how literary works and humanistic criticism can play key roles in the dialogue on responsible computing.

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The Police State, Livestock Breeding and Web 2.0: Research by 3 Duke Professors - Duke Today

OPINION: We are not the virus | Opinion – N.C. State University Technician Online

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Scrolling through my Twitter feed is one of the only things getting me through this quarantine right now. I get to see lots of memes and videos, and I also get to be informed of things going on around the world. In such a time of uncertainty, Twitter can be a way to escape. However, because information spreads so fast, some things trending on Twitter are making my blood boil. Its a love-hate relationship I have with Twitter. Its definitely a huge cause of frustration for me because Ive been seeing many misinformed things go viral.

One of my least favorite tweets that have gone viral in the past month are tweets that claim The planet is healing itself. We are the virus, with some relevant hashtags. Some tweets even contained pictures from fish returning to canals in Italy and the water finally clearing up. It is beautiful to see nature thriving, but spreading this kind of idea about humans being the issue in our world in the midst of this deadly pandemic is irresponsible.

This movement is defined as ecofascism, and its becoming a new kind of plague. Grist reports that this is The promotion of authoritarian, fascist ideologies for environmental good. While it is valid that carbon emissions and pollution have decreased around the world due to the widespread lockdowns and quarantine, the idea that this virus is good for the world is foolish. I am an environmentalist myself, and I would never even think about saying anything like this, because it diminishes the loss of many lives around the world due to this pandemic.

According to GQ, ecofascism is the idea that there is only one way to deal with the climate crisis and that is through the use of eugenics and suppressing immigrants/migrants. A man named Madison Grant was the founder of it all. He created the very first organizations dedicated to preserving the Cali redwoods and the American buffalo. While he gave rise to a movement that couldve been great, he was also a huge supporter of race science, the idea that races exist biologically, thus, racists attributing people of other races as different species or different breeds, inferring a racial hierarchy, which was wrong and unfounded.

As Luke Darby of GQ wrote, Eco-fascism relies heavily on a concept called deep ecology, the idea that the only way to preserve life on Earth is to dramatically forcefully, if necessary reduce the human population. Unfortunately, due to ecofascism, some individuals have taken actions to reduce the human population into their own hands. On Aug. 3, 2019, a mass shooting occurred at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, causing the loss of 22 individuals, and the injuries of 24 more people. Before the shooter committed this act of terrorism, he produced a manifesto, in which he talked about stopping the Hispanic invasion of Texas. In this he wrote, If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can be more sustainable.

While these tweets arent explicitly stating things or engaging in acts of promoting the loss of individuals, claiming humans are the virus promotes the belief that humans dont have the ability to fix the climate crisis. Essentially, these tweets implicate that mass death is an appropriate solution to climate change. Many eco-fascists attribute the climate crisis to overpopulation when this is simply not the case. Global Justice reports that overpopulation is not the main reason behind the climate crisis, it is in fact, the rich corporations and people that produce the most emissions.

According to the Global Justice article and OXFAM International, it likely draws its claim from, The carbon emissions of just one of the worlds richest 1% of people are equivalent to 175 of the poorest. 50% of the worlds emissions are coming from just 10% of the people. This isnt about population it's about greed. Shrinking the population wouldnt solve the problem.

Quite simply, money controls everything. It equals power, and having power in a world full of greed allows you to break the rules, and not worry about the effects you have on the Earth. Eco-fascists spew ideas of ignorance about individuals who dont even have that much of an impact on the climate crisis, it is hypocritical. If they truly believed in helping the planet, they would attack these wealthy corporations and the system that allowed for the crisis to become so severe.

All in all, ecofascism is a movement that should be put to an end. In society, it is too often where individuals find a scapegoat to blame their problems on. It is unfair to place the weight of the world on individuals who contribute little to nothing to the climate crisis. They are equally struggling and blaming them is not going to solve this issue. What must be done now is stop spreading the notion that humans are the virus when we really are the cure. The 1%and wealthy corporations must be held accountable for their crimes against society. They are aware of the effect they have, and are selfish and will not stop unless people speak up. So, by rising against these individuals, change can foster, and the climate crisis can be mended.

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OPINION: We are not the virus | Opinion - N.C. State University Technician Online

The Price of the Coronavirus Pandemic – The New Yorker

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Meanwhile, New Yorks health-care system was sinking into chaos, as COVID-19 cases swamped hospitals. That day, there were more 911 calls than there had been on September 11, 2001. Some Fokkers, however, felt that it was important not to get swept up in apocalyptic tales or media reports, or to fall for the Chicken Littles. They mocked Jim Cramer, the host of the market program Mad Money, on CNBC, for predicting a great depression and wondering if anyone would ever board an airplane again. Anecdotes, hyperbole: the talking chuckleheads sowing and selling fear.

As in epidemiology, the basis of the financial markets, and of arguments about them, is numbersdata and their deployments. Reliable data about COVID-19 have been scarce, mainly because, in the shameful absence of widespread testing, no one knows how many people have or have had the virus, which would determine the rate of infection and, most crucially, the fatality rate. The numerator (how many have died) is known, more or less, but its the denominator (how many have caught it) that has been the object of such speculation. If I had a roll of toilet paper for every finance guys analysis of the death rate Ive been asked to read, Id have toilet paper. Most of these calculations, it seems, are arguments for why the rate is likely to be much, much lower than the medical experts have concluded. The less lethal it is, the better the comparison to the flu, and therefore the easier it is to chide everyone for getting so worked up over it. As Lawrence White, a professor of economics at George Mason University, tweeted, Almost everyone talking about the #coronavirus is displaying strong confirmation bias. Which only goes to prove what Ive always said.

Still, its hard for a coldhearted capitalist to know just how cold the heart must go. Public-health professionals make a cost-benefit calculation, too, with different weightings. Whats the trade-off? How many deaths are tolerable? Zero? Tens of thousands, as with the flu? Or whatever number it is that will keep us from slipping into a global depression? The public-health hazards of deepening unemployment and povertymental illness, suicide, addiction, malnutritionare uncounted.

Financial people love to come at you with numbers, to cluck over the innumeracy of the populace and the press, to cite the tyranny of the anecdote and the superior risk-assessment calculus of the guy who has an understanding of stochastic volatility and some skin in the gameeven when that skin is other peoples. But while risk and price are intertwined, value and values are something else entirely. It can be hard to find the right math for those.

In the months following the first tidings of COVID-19 from China, Trump played down its potential impactattempting to jawbone a virus, or at least the perception of it. But a virus, unlike a President, doesnt care how its perceived. It gets penetration, whether you believe in it or not. By the time, later in March, that he acknowledged the scale of the pandemic (and sought to convince those who hadnt been paying attention that hed been paying attention all along, except to the extent that hed been distracted), it had long been abundantly clear that he cared more about the economic damageeven if it was only in relation to his relection prospects, or to the fate of his hotel and golf-resort businessesthan about any particular threshold regarding loss of life or the greater good. Others, perhaps on his behalf, have tried to expand his position. For a few days, the message, reinforced by the likes of Glenn Beck (Id rather die than kill the country) and Dan Patrick, the soon-to-be-seventy lieutenant governor of Texas (If thats the exchange, Im all in), was that we might have to sacrifice our elders for the sake of the economy. The politics of it were perverse. Many of the same people who had cited death panels in the fight against Obamacare were now essentially arguing the opposite. One mans cost controls are another mans eugenics.

For Trump, the economy is basically the stock market. Hes obsessed with it, much the way he fixates on television ratings. The stock market is, among other things, a great mood indicator. But it isnt the economynot even close. As were now discovering, to more horror than surprise, the cessation of commercial activitytravel, tourism, entertainment, restaurants, sports, construction, conferences, or really any transactions, in significant volume, be they in lawyering, accounting, book sales, or sparkplugsmeans no revenue, no ability to make payroll or rent, mass layoffs, steep declines in both supply and demand, and reverberations, up and down the food chain, of defaults on debt. Thats the economy.

This brutal shock is attacking a body that was already vulnerable. In the event of a global depression, a postmortem might identify COVID-19 as the cause of death, but, as with so many of the viruss victims, the economy had a prexisting conditiondebt, instead of pulmonary disease. Corporate debt, high-yield debt, distressed debt, student debt, consumer debt, mortgage debt, sovereign debt. Its as if the virus is almost beside the point, a trader I know told me. This was all set up to happen.

The trader was one of those guys who had been muttering about a financial collapse for a decade. The 2008 bailout, with the politically motivated and, at best, capricious sorting of winners and losers, rankled, as did the ongoing collusion among the big banks, the Federal Reserve, and politicians of both parties. Hed heard that the smart money, like the giant asset-management firms Blackstone and the Carlyle Group, was now telling companies to draw down their bank lines, and borrow as much as they could, in case the lenders went out of business or found ways to say no. Sure enough, by Marchs end, corporations had reportedly tapped a record two hundred and eight billion dollars from their revolving-credit linesa revolver frenzy, as the financial blog Zero Hedge put it, in publishing a list of the companies that managed to get their money in time. Corporate America had hit up the pawnshop, en masse. In a world where we talk, suddenly, of trillions, two hundred billion may not seem like a lot, but it is: in 2007, the subprime-mortgage lender Countrywide Financial, in drawing down just $11.5 billion, helped bring the system to its knees.

It is hard to navigate out of the debt trap. Creditors can forgive debtors, but that process, especially at this level, would be almost impossibly laborious and fraught. Meanwhile, defaults flood the market with collateral, be it buildings, stocks, or aircraft. The price of that collateral collapseshaircuts for baldheadsleading to more defaults. The market in distressed debt has already ballooned to about a trillion dollars.

As April arrived, businesses, large and small, decided not to pay rent, either because they didnt have the cash on hand or because, with a recession looming, they wanted to preserve what cash they had. Furloughed or fired employees, meanwhile, faced similar decisions, as landlords sent threatening reminders. Would property owners, without their monthly nut, be able to finance their own debts? And what of the banks, with all the bad paper? In the last week of March, an additional 6.6 million Americans filed jobless claims, doubling the previous weeks record. In New York State, where nearly half a million new claims had been filed in two weeks, the unemployment-insurance trust began to teeter toward insolvency. Come summer, there would be no money left to pay unemployment benefits.

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The Price of the Coronavirus Pandemic - The New Yorker

Wage slavery: why employees withhold wages, and accountants across the country are going crazy in payday – The Global Domains News

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the Law on the abolition of wage slavery operates in Russia since 2014. Employees have the right to choose the Bank card that will be paid salary. Last year came into force the latest amendments: employers will be fined for refusing to list the salary on the card that was chosen by the employee. The new law complicated the work of accountants: they have to manually transfer staff salaries to cards of different banks. However, at the end of 2019 appeared a service that will help move the time-consuming process in a single click.

Amendments to the labor law gave Russians the right to choose any Bank to open a salary account. The downside is the increased time and financial costs, which fell on the shoulders of employers.

How much money big business loses on salary

Accountants have to complete a separate payment documents and send them to different banks. The increase in labor costs is especially noticeable in medium and large business. The staff also noticed the change: wages began to fall to the map later than usual.

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Wage slavery: why employees withhold wages, and accountants across the country are going crazy in payday - The Global Domains News

Fear and Loathing in Coronaville Volume 4: Insanity is a Virtue in a Mad World – CounterPunch

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As I scrawl the sloppy copy for my latest manifesto on a windowpane between my thoughts on string theory and Kevin Bacons connection to 9/11 (Madoff made him do it!), I am sincerely struck by Americas latest outpouring of affection for the pathologically eccentric. We may be on the veranda of a new black death but it has never been a better time to be mad in America. Not only is the evening news waxing hysterical and joining the angrier voices in my head like a Henry Rollins gospel ensemble, but every corporate huckster from Viacom to Disney apparently wants to be alone with me (Ill be Daria if you play Snow White).

Even before this country was strapped down into the straitjacket of corona pandemonia, a movement to normalize and destigmatize the scarlet letter of mental illness in mainstream America was well underway. Finally, its OK to be nuts! Fuck, its downright sexy. But this brings to mind a question that has long haunted me. What exactly is mental illness in this age of post-modern collapse and synergistic corporate hysteria? What does it mean to be crazy in such a sick sad world?

According to all the back-slapping do-gooders in the medical establishment, as well as the cultural icons who pander in their jabber, mental illness is just that, an illness of the mind. But just try and ask your therapist what the fuck that really means and hell likely smugly reply, Well, what do you think that means?, before charging you half a grand for his insightful Freudian evasive maneuver. The fine folks at the DSM seem to agree that mental illness is a condition affecting mood, thinking, or behavior in a way that negatively affects functioning in mainstream society. But thats just it, have you taken a fucking look at mainstream society lately?

Palestinian children are starving next door to wealthy kibbutzs, the coral reefs are bleaching like goddamn gym socks, the Amazon is burning to the fucking ground, supposed democracies are fighting a plague with a growing police state, and you fuckers still care more about Kylie Jenners bleached asshole than your own impending doom. If this is what passes for mainstream society, why the fuck would any person with half a conscience even want to function in it? I may be sick, but you people are fucking depraved. Lets have another Whopper and bomb Iran, oh what a normal world!

I have always been pathologically at odds with the normal world and the normal world has never made their disdain for my inability to conform to its wishes a secret. At a very young age, I learned the harsh lesson that I was different and that wasnt OK with the upstanding adults in my life. My issues with what is commonly known as mental illness have always been deeply intertwined with my dizzyingly fluid gender identity, and why not? Just like gender (not to mention race, sexuality, and adulthood), mental illness is essentially a social construct defined by class and civilization.

In fact, it wasnt so long ago that the DSM considered all queer bodies to be insane. I happen to agree with them. Your average Jane is just peachy with normal. She puts on the appropriate uniform, performs wage slavery, and goes home to accept all the right organs in all the right holes. Us queer and crazy folk are biologically driven not to blindly embrace such preconceived notions and for that sin we must be carefully categorized and heavily medicated before we can serve the only role deemed fit for us to play by the sane world, as well behaved tokens of progress and tolerance. Ooh! Doesnt it just feel yummy to belong?

But some of us dont want to fucking belong. Weve had a look at your beige Barbie Dreamworld and we can smell the corpses baked beneath the plastic veneer. And now there are more of us, more every single day. You see, it is society, with its amoral global capitalist bloodbath and the diseases this fosters, which is truly unhinged, and the harder this hard truth becomes to ignore, the more insane people proliferate. Do you really think all the mass shooters work for the NRA? Do you honestly believe that kids are throwing themselves from tall buildings because theyre simply bummed out? Weve had enough. We see the writing on the fucking wall and we dont like what it says. Coronavirus is just a dress rehearsal for the upheaval that is to come. So civilization finally sees us, and welcomes us, and cherishes us, just so long as the growing horde of pathological malcontents stays home and stays properly medicated.

Well, Ive got some writing for your wall- Fuck. You. This is one crazy person who wont keep quiet while the sane savages rape and pillage whats left of this planet in one big craven mass suicide attempt. I will rage like a proud lunatic against your twisted designs and youre gonna need to build bigger pills and bigger prisons to shut me up. Better get to work. Your time is running out. The dawn of the day of the mad dog is upon us.

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Fear and Loathing in Coronaville Volume 4: Insanity is a Virtue in a Mad World - CounterPunch

UCLA Law Dean Apologizes for My Having Accurately Quoted the Word "Nigger" in Discussing a Case – Reason

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When I teach First Amendment law, I tend to talk for a few minutes each week about real First Amendment events in the news. In October 2019, when two UConn students were being prosecuted for "racial ridicule" for walking on campus and shouting "nigger" (apparently at no-one in particular)an extremely rare instance of an actual hate speech prosecution in the U.S., and thus an excellent illustration of the legal rules that we had been learning and the arguments that we had been consideringI discussed that case in class. As I always do, I discussed the facts, without expurgation or euphemisms. A few weeks after the class, I learned that some students had disapproved, but I didn't discuss it further with any students.

In early March 2020, right before an event at which a professor from a different law school was talking, someone shouted to me something like, "Volokh, don't use the n-word today!" (I'm not expurgating here, as you might gather; he did say, "n-word.") The speaker, to whom I was talking at the time, asked me what that was about, and I responded that, last Fall, I had talked about the prosecution of the UConn who had shouted "nigger," and some students were upset about my quoting that word. I wasn't speaking to the class as a whole, though I also wasn't trying to whisper: Especially at an American university, it seems to me, faculty and students (and others) should be free to discuss incidents in the news (or incidents in the law school) without looking over the shoulder to see who might overhear and be offended.

Also, no-one has tried to make anything of this (at least yet), but to fully disclose matters, let me note that in my Amicus Clinic class this Semester we were discussing our cases, and in one of them a man was being prosecuted for saying "What, are you an idiot? What do I have to do, be a nigger to be served in thisin this place?" to a black employee at the VA. (I believe that such speech might well have been constitutionally unprotected against a "fighting words" prosecution, or perhaps under some other theory; but the jury instruction in his case allowed the jury to convict him based on the use of "loud, abusive, or otherwise improper language," and our argument for amici will be that this prohibition on "otherwise improper" language is unconstitutionally vague and potentially viewpoint-based.)As you might gather, I quoted that as well.

My Dean (whom I much like, and whose work I generally much respect) has now issued a public apology to the UCLA Law community for the first two of these incidents:

Earlier in the year, Professor Eugene Volokh used the "n-word," both in classin teaching a First Amendment caseand outside of class when recounting the incident to a colleague. As you may know, Professor Volokh has strong views about why he chooses to use incendiary languageeven when vilein his classroom, without euphemism or alteration. While he has the right to make that choice as a matter of academic freedom and First Amendment rights, so long as he is not using this or other words with animus, many of usmyself includedstrongly believe that he could achieve his learning goals more effectively and empathetically without repeating the word itself. That is equally true in casual settings outside the classroom. Slurs, even when mentioned for pedagogical purposes, hurt people. The n-word is inextricably associated with anti-Black prejudice, racism and slavery; it is a word that carries with it the weight of our shameful history and the reality of ongoing anti-Black racism. I am deeply sorry for the pain and offense the use of this word has caused, and I very much respect the important work our Black Law Students Association undertook, using speech to counter speech, in the flowchart they distributed around the building.

I want to respond here by explaining why I think I was right, and why I will continue to accurately quote things in class and outside it. This is of course very similar to what I said about the controversy at Wake Forest involving the great legal historian Prof. Michael Kent Curtis, but I thought I needed to repeat it here as well.

My view is that, in class readings and in-class discussions (as well as in outside-class discussions), professors ought to mention what actually happens in a case or incident, without euphemism or expurgation; and students should feel free to do the same. If professors and students feel uncomfortable with saying those words themselves, I wouldn't condemn their decision to use an expurgated form (see, e.g.,Prof. Geoffrey Stone's decision along these lines); but I think the better approach is to accurately quote.

Professors certainly shouldn't use epithets, racial or otherwise, to themselves insult people. But when they are talking about what has been said, I think it's important that they report it as it was said. This is often called the "use-mention distinction," see, e.g., Randall Kennedy,How a Dispute Over the N-Word Became a Dispiriting Farce, Chron. Higher Ed., Feb. 8, 2019; John McWhorter,If President Obama Can Say It, You Can Too, Time, June 22, 2015(distinguishing "using" from "referring to").

Thus, when I have talked in my First Amendment Law class aboutCohen v. California, I talked about Cohen's "Fuck the Draft" jacket, not "F-word the Draft." When I talked aboutSnyder v. Phelps, I talked about Phelps' signs saying things like "God Hates Fags." When I talked aboutMatal v. Tam, I talked about a trademark for a band called "The Slants," which some view as a derogatory term for Asians. I suspect many, likely most, law professors do the same; they should certainly be allowed to. If I were to talk about the Redskins trademark case, I would say "Redskins," rather than talk around the word, the way some news outlets apparently do.

To turn to speech hostile to a group I belong to (Jews), when I talked about a rare recent group libel case, the MontanaState v. Leniocase, I noted that Lenio said, "I think every jew on the planet deserves to be killed for what kikes have done to our #dollar and cost of living Killing jews > wage #slave .," "#Copenhagen [referring to the then-recent Copenhagen shootings, including at a synagogue] It's important to note that jews hate free speech & are known bullsh-ters, could be #falseFlag So Hope for many REAL dead kikes," and "Now that the holocaust has been proven to be a lie Beyond a reasonable doubt, it is now time to hunt the Nazi hunters." (As it happens, both my parents came close to actually being killed by Nazis in World War II: My father was trapped in besieged Leningrad [civilian death toll about 1/3], and my mother was a Jew in Kiev [likewise, death toll about 1/3 or more] who would likely have been murdered with the other Ukrainian Jews if she hadn't been evacuated to Siberia. Nazi rhetoric and symbolism: Not my favorite.)

We have had readings or slides discussing cross-burning, and depicting swastikas and Confederate flags connected to cases or problems. And of course when I talk about leading First Amendment cases (such as Brandenburg v. Ohio,Virginia v. Black,NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware,Board of Ed. v. Pico, and more) that use the word "nigger," I don't try to avoid the word, and don't expect my students to.

This is so for several related reasons:

[1.] First, the law school is part of a university, where we should try to discuss the world as it is, the evil as well as the good, whether in law classes, history classes, literature classes, film classes, modern music classes, or elsewhere. This strikes me as a fundamental feature of the modern university: The right (I think the duty, but at least the right) to accurately present and discuss the facts of the world around us. That should be true of literature departments, of history departments, of law schools, or any other part of the university where such matters may arise.

[2.] Another reason is that, once a rule is set forth that you can't use "nigger," people will naturally assume that this reflects a broader principle. What about "fag" in "God hates fags" fromSnyderor the other Westboro Baptist Church cases? What about swastikas or Confederate flags or "Negro," in law school classes or history cases or other classes in which these are parts of the relevant materials?

Normally, we expect students to accept candid discussions of awful things (and history and law are chock full of awful things). But once one word that bitterly insults one group is made taboo, it's human nature for other groups to expect equal treatment for themselves. A categorical principle that all of us can quote all words, precisely because we are reporting the facts rather than using the words pejoratively, strikes me as a much better approach, and one that will help decrease the extra hurt feelings that will arise if, say, gay students were told that "fag" can be quoted but "nigger" can't be.

[3.] Beyond this, a good deal of history and of crime is much more painful than mere racial hostility (even the bitter hostility that many actual uses of "nigger" reflect). Genocide. Slavery. Hitler, Stalin, Mao. Rape.Child molestation. Lynching.

Some students may understandably find being reminded of such things to be much more painful than just hearing a quote from some racists. To give one concrete example, some years ago several law school administrators at a Top 20 law school told students designing a moot court problem to remove one of the precedents from the readings. (Moot court problems often focus on writing and oral delivery rather than research, and therefore give students a closed set of precedents on which they can rely.)

The problem was about the First Amendment and threats. The case that they were told to remove was the most important precedent in the field,Virginia v.Black.The reason given to remove the case was that the precedent involved cross-burning, which might be seen as too traumatic for some students. The result would have been pedagogically nonsensical, Hamlet without the Prince. Indeed, it would have taught the wrong messageand, I think, would have been humiliating for the students and the school when outside judges asked the students in the oral arguments why they hadn't discussedthekey precedent.

Fortunately, the decision was ultimately reversed. But this is where we go with the logic of compulsory expurgation of racially offensive material from sources that include it.

[4.] Moreover, law schools are training people to become lawyers. Lawyers have to deal with facts as they are, regardless of how unpleasant those facts may be. They need to read cases that contain nasty words and describe nastier actions. Do a Westlaw search fornigger & da(aft 1/1/1990), and you will find a bit more than 10,000 such cases, and there are many cases that quote other epithets as well; nor is the pace slowing down. (These cases, by the way, include Supreme Court opinions by, among others, Justices Blackmun, Ginsburg, Marshall, O'Connor, Sotomayor, and Thomas.)

And that's just in the cases that lawyers may have to read and discuss. On top of that, lawyers have to listen to witnesses who report what they heard. They have to listen to opposing counsel who quote cases and evidence. They have to hear judges who do the same. (Westlaw archives far fewer oral arguments than cases, but a search through its limited trial transcript and oral argument database for likewise reveals hundreds of mentions of "nigger.")

And indeed every day, lawyers of all races, religions, ethnic groups, and sexual orientations handle caseswhether in criminal law, employment law, education law, civil rights law, family law, or elsewherein which they hear extremely offensive material. They handle these situations with professionalism, and don't let the casual cruelty, callousness, and hatred that they read or hear about get them down. (Just to give one prominent example, the defendant's brief in the leading First Amendment precedent Brandenburg v. Ohio, a case in which a KKK speaker used the word "nigger" repeatedly, was cowritten by Eleanor Holmes Norton, now the delegate to Congress from D.C. and then a young black lawyer. Unsurprisingly, both the Supreme Court opinion and Del. Norton's brief accurately and repeatedly quoted that word.)

I do not for a moment think that black lawyers allow themselves to be debilitated by hearing material about racism, gay lawyers about hatred towards gays, Jewish lawyers about anti-Semitism, and so on, whether that material describes violent attacks, contains epithets, or whatever else. I think that, as law students and law professors, we should follow this example.

[5.] Indeed, the implicit message of the claim that black law students, in particular, need to be protected from hearing cases that contain the word "nigger," because they find it so "painful" or "challenging" (to quote the Dean of Wake Forest's law school) or offensive or even traumatic, is that young black lawyers will likewise be sharply disturbed by hearing the word in the everyday reality of their practicesin courtrooms, in depositions, in witness interviews, wherever it is part of the facts of a case or of a relevant precedent. If this were true, then this would suggest that black lawyers are going to be less effective than white lawyers, because they are so pained, challenged, disturbed, and distracted by simply hearing the word.

As I mentioned in item 4 above, I do not for a moment believe that black lawyers actually are less effective lawyers, precisely because I do not believe that they are so easily wounded simply by hearing the facts of a case. But I also don't believe that black law students (or other law students) are likewise so easily wounded.

I believe that students and lawyers of all identities are perfectly capable of handling the often ugly reality of the world, as reflected in the precedents and in the cases before them. And I think it does them no service to tell them that they are somehow entitled to be so shielded from that reality that they don't even hear some aspects of that reality.

For more on this subject, see Randall Kennedy's bookNigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word,(2003), as well as Randall Kennedy,How a Dispute Over the N-Word Became a Dispiriting Farce, Chron. Higher Ed., Feb. 8, 2019; John McWhorter,If President Obama Can Say It, You Can Too, Time, June 22, 2015, which I also mentioned above. And if you're interested, you might also considerJohnnie Cochran's argumentin the O.J. Simpson trial, which I think provides a helpful analogy (though I recognize that we're talking here about analogy and not identity).

Prosecutor Chris Darden had argued that the Judge should exclude evidence of Mark Fuhrman's use of the word "nigger," "because it is so prejudicial and so extremely inflammatory that to use that word in any situation will evoke some type of emotional response from any African American within earshot of that word." Darden went on,

Mr. Cochran would like to ask a white police officer if he ever used that word and after that white police officer testifies there will be other white male police officers, and by the time those other officers testify they willthe jury will have heard this word, they will be upset, they will have become emotional, and as soon as Mr. Cochran works them up into that emotional frenzy he would like to get them into, as soon as he does that and the next white police officer takes the witness stand, the jury is going to paint that white police officer with the same brush Mr. Cochran painted Detective Fuhrman.

Here was Johnnie Cochran's response:

[Mr. Darden's] remarks are demeaning to African Americans as a group.

It is demeaning to our jurors to say that African Americans who have lived under oppression for 200 plus years in this country cannot work within the mainstream, cannot hear these offensive words. African Americans live with offensive words, offensive looks, offensive treatment every day of their lives, but yet they still believe in this country. And to say that our jurors, because they hear this offensive wordevery day that people call, that they interact with people, we have heard this in the questionnairesto say they can't be fair is absolutely outrageous for the prosecution to stand here and over the last couple of days to present character assassination against this man, unfounded, bogus charges after charge after charge, then to withdraw seventeen of those charges, for them to have the temerity, the unmitigated gall to come into this courtroom and talk about fairness.

What we are going to be talking about this afternoon, your honor, is words out of the mouth of Mark Fuhrman. What I want to share with you are the things that this man said, not what we made up, what he said, what he told people.

Your honor, we didn't create Mark Fuhrman. We take witnesses the way we find them. We didn't tell him to go to the doctor and say all those things that I will share with you this afternoon. We didn't tell him to say those things in front of Kathleen Bell.

Cochran was an excellent lawyer who was prepared to confront the ugly reality of the world in effectively defending his client. Teaching students that they are entitled never to hear the word "nigger" quoted from accounts of real cases or incidents will not, I think, help them become such excellent lawyers.

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UCLA Law Dean Apologizes for My Having Accurately Quoted the Word "Nigger" in Discussing a Case - Reason

Modern Slavery: The Kenyan Domestic Workers That Are Trafficked & Forced To Work In Hong Kong – Green Queen Media

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Slavery is not a thing of the past. It still exists today, affecting millions across the world, including our home here in Hong Kong, where Kenyan domestic workers are trafficked and subjected to forced labour in the city.

In the past years, high-profile stories documenting the abuse of foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong, such as the cases of Erwiana Sulistyaningsih and Kartika Puspitasari have put modern slavery and forced labour into the spotlight. But there have been many, perhaps thousands of cases that have never been covered. The stories of these victims of human trafficking, abuse, modern slavery are more often than not hidden, lost and forgotten, especially amidst the dominant headlines surrounding months of protests followed by the global coronavirus pandemic.

Investigative work undertaken by Hong Kong nonprofit Migrasia has uncovered at least 5 known victims (and dozens more implicated) in a collective case of human trafficking and forced labour of Kenyan domestic workers.

In 2018, the Hong Kong government enacted an Action Plan to combat trafficking and enhance the protection of migrant domestic workers in the city. The plan outlines various measures, from mechanisms to screen victims to increasing penalties for offenders and providing witness immunity.

But what Migrasia has exposed is the depressing fact that Hong Kong isnt just a regional transit hub for the global illegal trafficking trade. There is a systematic failure to protect victims at every turn. Kenyan victims of trafficking and forced labour who are fighting for their justice have been facing opposition at every single step of the way.

The stories of the women that Migrasia are currently working with are appalling cases of consistent exploitation by an agency which is still operating at large, unpunished and with near impunity.

Victims were deceived by an unscrupulous agency and lured into believing that the job that lies ahead of them will promise high salaries, long-term contracts and good living conditions. Unaware that agencies are bound by Hong Kong law to charge no more than 10% of the first months salaries, prospective workers were overcharged a fee of HK$24,000 to take up the opportunity, forcing them to undertake various loans and guarantee documents.

Upon arrival in Hong Kong, their passports were confiscated from them. They must work for a monthly salary, 90% of which is deducted until they pay off their loans all the while being subjected to physical and verbal abuse. They are left with practically nothing. No phones, no holidays, no statutory days off that domestic workers are entitled to by law. Not even three meals in some cases. Some are not allowed to set foot outside their employers homes for months on end. They are stripped of their human rights and dignity.

While a handful of victims have stepped forward, Migrasia estimates that dozens from Kenya have been brought to Hong Kong by this particular agency alone. It is possible that more than 200 were involved, but the Hong Kong Immigration Department has not made available the statistics of entry visa applications for Kenyan and Nepalese nationals, despite an Access to Information request submitted by the organisation.

When at least 8 Kenyan nationals reported their case to the Employment Agencies Administration (EEA) and the Hong Kong Police Force in addition to the Immigration Department in 2018, no concrete action has been taken to stop the perpetrating agency from its illegal operations, from facilitating modern slavery to suspected laundering of the funds they illicitly took from the victims.

There has been no investigation, no prosecution, no warning letter issued.

In fact, victims were threatened with arrest when they explained to the authorities that the agency had forged some of their employment documents. Even when the individuals were identified as victims of trafficking by the United Nations-affiliated organisation International Organisation for Migration (IOM), no conclusive law enforcement actions were taken by the Hong Kong authorities.

And now, not only are low-wage earners and disadvantaged groups in Hong Kong disproportionately exposed to the impact of the the coronavirus pandemic, those who have been harmed by the fraudulent agency are being pushed even further away from the justice they deserve. The most vulnerable in society are now even more at risk due to Covid-19. Victims of abuse are having difficulty accessing justice. Hong Kongs courts have been practically shut down and cases are being pushed over and over again, explained David Bishop, co-founder of Migrasia, lawyer and principal lecturer at the University of Hong Kong.

The Hong Kong system should have sprung into action when authorities were first notified of alleged modern slavery. But it didnt it failed to protect some of the most exploited people in the city where help is needed the most.

Despite the uphill battle, organisations like Migrasia are still advocating for change and are actively working to bring justice for the marginalised. Last year, 80% of the Hong Kong governments successful prosecutions relating to migrant workers and forced labour including the most recent arrests of job scammers targeting foreign domestic helpers were brought forward by Migrasia. They have also developed the Know Your Agency app to visualise the scale of the problem and educate the community.

But we cannot rely on civil society organisations alone. The Kenyan cases of human trafficking are just one of many cases where people suffer horrific conditions of abuse and modern slavery passing through or happening in Hong Kong. Across wider Asia, there are 11.7 million people in forced labour conditions.

Without systematic change in the city to eliminate its role in the underground market, there will only be more hidden victims left in the dark.

Lead image courtesy of Freepik.

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Modern Slavery: The Kenyan Domestic Workers That Are Trafficked & Forced To Work In Hong Kong - Green Queen Media

When the Founding Fathers Settled States’ vs. Federal RightsAnd Saved the Nation – History

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When the 13 United States of America declared independence from the United Kingdom in 1776, the founders were attempting to break free from the tyranny of Britains top-down centralized government.

But the first constitution the founders created, the Articles of Confederation, vested almost all power in individual state legislatures and practically nothing in the national government. The resultpolitical chaos and crippling debtalmost sunk the fledgling nation before it left the harbor.

So the founders met again in Philadelphia in 1787 and drafted a new Constitution grounded in a novel separation of state and national powers known as federalism. While the word itself doesnt appear anywhere in the Constitution, federalism became the guiding principle to safeguard Americans against King George III-style tyranny while providing a check against rogue states.

READ MORE: How the United States Constitution Came to Be

The Articles of Confederation.

Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images

The Articles of Confederation were written and ratified while the Revolutionary War was still raging. The document is less of a unifying constitution than a loose pact between 13 sovereign states intending to enter into a firm league of friendship. Absent from the Articles of Confederation were the Executive or Judicial branches, and the national congress had only the power to declare war and sign treaties, but no authority to directly levy taxes.

As a result, the newly independent United States was buried in debt by 1786 and unable to pay the long-overdue wages of Revolutionary soldiers. The U.S. economy sunk into a deep depression and struggling citizens lost their farms and homes. In Massachusetts, angry farmers joined Shays Rebellion to seize courthouses and block foreclosures, and a toothless congress was powerless to put it down.

George Washington, temporarily retired from government service, lamented to John Jay, What a triumph for the advocates of despotism to find that we are incapable of governing ourselves, and that systems founded on the basis of equal liberty are merely ideal & fallacious!

Alexander Hamilton called for a new Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 where the Articles of Confederation were ultimately thrown out in favor of an entirely new form of government.

READ MORE: The Founding Fathers Feared Foreign InfluenceAnd Devised Protections Against It

When the United States cut ties with Britain, the founders wanted nothing to do with the British form of government known as unitary. Under a unitary regime, all power originates from a centralized national government (Parliament) and is delegated to local governments. Thats still the way the government operates in the UK.

Instead, the founders initially chose the opposite form of government, a confederation. In a confederation, all power originates at the local level in the individual states and is only delegated to a weak central government at the states discretion.

When the founders met in Philadelphia, it was clear that a confederation wasnt enough to hold the young nation together. States were scuffling over borders and minting their own money. Massachusetts had to hire its own army to put down Shays Rebellion.

The solution was to find a middle way, a blueprint of government in which the powers were shared and balanced between the states and national interests. That compromise, woven into the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, became known as federalism.

The Constitution and the Bill of Rights created two different kinds of separation of powers, both designed to act as critical checks and balances.

The first and best-known of the separation of powers is between the three branches of government: Executive, Legislative and the Judiciary. If the president acts against the best interests of the country, he or she can be impeached by Congress. If Congress passes an unjust law, the president can veto it. And if any law or public institution infringes on the constitutional rights of the people, the Supreme Court can remedy it.

READ MORE: How Many U.S. Presidents Have Faced Impeachment?

But the second type of separation of powers is equally important, the granting of separate powers to the federal and state governments. Under the Constitution, the state legislatures retain much of their sovereignty to pass laws as they see fit, but the federal government also has the power to intervene when it suits the national interest. And under the supremacy clause found in Article IV, federal laws and statutes supersede state law.

Federalism, or the separation of powers between the state and federal government, was entirely new when the founders baked it into the Constitution. And while it functions as an important check, its also been a continual source of contention between the two levels of government. In the final run-up to the Civil War, the Southern states seceded from the Union in part because of the federal government was unconstitutionally encroaching on their domestic institutions of slavery.

WATCH: The Legislative Branch

According to James Madison, a committed federalist, the Constitution maintains the sovereignty of states by enumerating very few express powers to the federal government, while [t]hose which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.

Article I Section 8 contains a list of all of the enumerated powers that are exclusively delegated to the federal government. Those include the power to declare war, maintain armed forces, regulate commerce, coin money and establish a Post Office.

But that very same Section 8 also includes the so-called Elastic Clause that authorizes Congress to write and pass any laws that are necessary and proper to carry out its enumerated powers. These powers are known collectively as implied powers and have been used by Congress to create a national bank, to collect a federal income tax, to institute the draft, to pass gun control laws and to set a federal minimum wage, among others.

Other than that, the Constitution grants almost all other power and authority to the individual states, as Madison said. While the Constitution doesnt explicitly list the powers retained by the states, the founders included a catch-all in the 10th Amendment, ratified in 1791:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Those so-called reserved powers include all authority and functions of local and state governments, policing, education, the regulation of trade within a state, the running of elections and many more.

In the United States, federalism has proven a successful experiment in shared governance since 1787 and provided the model for similar federalist systems in Australia, Canada, India, Germany and several other nations.

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When the Founding Fathers Settled States' vs. Federal RightsAnd Saved the Nation - History

Uberised workers are on the frontline of the crisis – DiEM25

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Uberisation has become so prevalent in our Western economies that the word itself has entered the most conservative French dictionaries. The uberisation of the economy refers to a new type of worker, most of the time working for digital platforms as gig workers. Such platforms business model only works if they offload their costs related to employees and most often, also their tax burden, as most of these companies are based in tax havens or states that have highly reduced corporate taxes.

Digital platforms such as UBER, Deliveroo, Take it Easy, Foodora or Amazon choose to rely on freelance service providers rather than contracted workers in order to make an increased margin of profit. These platforms entice thousands of workers with false promises on the advantages of not being salaried employees: freedom, staggered working hours, being their own boss and so forth.

The other side of the coin is obvious, but not always properly assessed by those that are targeted: since they are not contracted workers, they do not benefit from the protection of Employment Law or from collective agreements. They therefore do not have access to employment benefits such as paid holidays, compulsory weekly rest, a minimum fixed salary, limited grounds for dismissal and, above all, unemployment protection and pension contributions. This pension contribution usually amounts to 50 percent of their wage and would be covered by the employer in France if they were under contract

What freedom is there when such platforms impose clients and routes? How can you be your own boss when you cannot turn down a call or a passenger at the risk of being badly rated and immediately dismissed? What free time do you have when you do not set your own prices and those imposed on you are so low that they force you to work until you find that you are putting your life, and sometimes even your health, in danger?

Ken Loach, in his latest film Sorry we missed you, illustrates the precariousness under which the uberisation of our economies is placing an increasing proportion of workers, including its potentially fatal consequences: You dont get hired here, states the delivery-depot boss in Loachs movie You come on board. We call it on-boarding. You dont workforus you workwithus but you die alone as a consequence of it, he may have added.

Uberised workers have become the new slaves of our economies: they are exploited at will for miserable incomes without any social protection and permanently tracked by embedded geolocation tools. The newspaper The Australian referred to this as The Hunger Games at Work.

Many large companies have seen the benefits they can derive from this flexible and disposable workforce. For example, some French retail banks recently announced that their account managers would soon no longer be hired as employees but will be accepted on a freelance basis.

During COVID19, major household retailers are now also adopting similar practices: in France as in other European countries, supermarkets like Franprix and Carrefour are taking advantage of this crisis to uberise their new staff instead of hiring them, even though their current profits would enable them to continue hiring employees.

Not only do self-employed workers no longer have any income, but they also have no right to unemployment benefit. They have little or no access to medical services depending on the country in which they work. Yet on the frontline, one finds those exploited workers, serving as delivery people who take on the risks of the virus to deliver takeaway meals, DVDs and toys to a confined population who will pay a trifle for a non-essential service.

A large number of customers who have become accustomed to these types of services for quite a few years now do not seem to ever ask themselves the question of whether or not they are endangering the lives of others. It is reminiscent of left-wing politicians prior to the COVID19 crisis arriving in Uber cars to campaign rallies where they would denounce low wages and precarious working situations.

Uberised workers constitute a proletariat that we do not hear from because they are not salaried workers and hence do not have workers representatives nor trade unions to speak for them.

For the moment, salvation came from a few courageous individuals amongst them and from the reasonable decisions handed down by several courts of justice that have taken hold of the problem in a number of European countries and beyond:

Most recently on 4 March 2020 the French Court of Cassation demonstrated the existence of employer-employee relationship between the Uber platform and its workers as they must obey the platforms commands and handed down a major ruling which reclassified this kind of service contract as an employment contract with all of the protections inherent to the status.

Platforms complained that this would ruin their business model. Ironically, it could be argued that in the early 19th century some businessmen also considered that the abolition of slavery would ruin their businesses, but this obviously would not justify holding back the abolition of slavery. Nevertheless, Emmanuel Macrons government immediately reacted by declaring that there was a need to invent new rules allowing freedom. Whose freedom?

In these times of COVID19, where health protection is synonymous with life or death, it is essential on this subject as on many others that DiEM25 encourages and leads trans-European reflection to counter the wishes of neoliberal governments allied with such platforms.

These platforms do not even pay taxes in the countries where their underpaid and abused workers operate, face danger and have to be taken care of by underfunded hospitals and infrastructure. They need to be held accountable for the position that they are putting workers in. The uberisation of the economy must be halted in order to guarantee that the labor rights of all European peoples are protected.

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Uberised workers are on the frontline of the crisis - DiEM25

Neville was spot on, Newcastle United, whataboutery and… – Football365.com

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Thank you for your mails on Gary Neville, Newcastle United and much more. Keep them coming to theeditor@football365.com

The other end of player wage questionCompletely agree with Gary Neville on Peter Swanns comments on that players not be paid to be well, bad.

Players are not contracted for games, they are contracted for a length of time and as far as I know that includes breaks. It is one thing if they caused the shutdown, but they didnt. Their contracts far as I know, are not open contracts that can be ended anytime but guerenteed unless they do something horrible and void it. Im sure a virus pandemic isnt one of those breaking conditions too (which should have a backup clause sure, but negotiated by both parties before signing).

If youre mad that you didnt for see a century wide virus pandemic, then too bad for not signing it as a condition the first place. You didnt like then next time contract for games then, and see whether the player accepts it or not or maybe ask for higher base wage. These days, more and more money is tied to performances bonus anyways than base wage.

The PFA has screwed up in some areas, some of the stick they get is warranted, some not. But as a union, times like this are where they protect the players especially those of the lower leagues. That doesnt mean not compromise to keep clubs alive, but arbitrarily not paying them when the is tight contract stipulates so? Yeah thats another thing.

Its easy to think of rich multimilllionaire stereotype when it comes to footballers, that is certainly true of the EPL in general and maybe the Championship to some extent. But League One and Two players dont earn much as far as I know (League Two has a wage limit for gods sake) and have have the limitations of short career and uncertainties that come with it.

Not saying it is the worse job in the world (they are worst paying and more dangerous) but some players of this category earn little money on short contracts with little guerentees and certainly took some time/training to hone their skills. They have bills, mortgages and families to feed too.

Some sacrifice will be needed, even in the lower league players side but that will be their call to make together cos they dont benefit from the club going down either. Running a League Two club in the midst of a global economic crisis, I can sort of sympathize with Swann to some extent, but that to say dont deserve their salary cos theyre not playing? Then put it in the contract in the first place. You are running a professional legal entity, not a school clubhouse.Yaru, Malaysia

NUFC and WhatabouteryDear F365,

A lot of debate about the possible ownership of NUFC and as usual with any debate on the tinternetthese days, the usual whatbouterykeeps popping up. So, just to provide a personal view about this from a Newcastle supporter whos currently having to spend time pondering the morality of this (because Newcastle have spent 40 years coming up with new and ingenious ways of torturing me and wasting my time, this being the absolute pinnacle).

1. There is, absolutely, a moral difference between retailers, bankers, financiers, and people you just dont like and describe as loathsome on twitter, and a regime that regularly kills and oppressespeople in more or less direct ways. There just is. Mike Ashley, much as I despise him, never deliberately bombed a Yemeni hospital. Zero hours contracts are a disgrace that should prompt a revolution in how we think about industry. They are not the murder and dismemberment of a journalist. Owning a hedge fund makes you a twat. It doesnt make you an actual dictator responsible for beheadings. On that basis, then, there is only club in Britain that is owned by people anywhere near as morally compromised as the Saudis. And thats Sunderland. Only kidding. Its Man City, obviously.

2. It doesntmatterthat there are other owners, in Britain, or the world, that are as bad, or nearly as bad. Because I dont support them. Im not a fan of them. I dont give them money, wear their shirt, add my voice to theirs, make them an interesting commercial or cultural proposition. They dont belong to me. In fact, at least twice a season Ill call them twats and actively wish them to be beaten.

3. So, while being part of the whole circus of football compromises us all in the same way that buying fast fashion makes us distantly responsible for labour standards in bangladesh, its only when your club is actually bought by someone who puts women who want the vote in jail and keeps a large population of workers in a state of semi-slavery that this stuff becomes genuinely relevant to you. And you do, genuinely, have to make a decision about that comes down to, fundamentally, do you support that regime? Do you support the use of the money they have generated via their dictatorship to buy someone who can drop a ball onto a five-pence piece in the box? Are you going to cheer thatPROJECT on on a Saturday afternoon?

4. It doesnt matter what other clubs do, it doesnt really matter what the objective of the exercise is from the Saudi point of view. It matters that this is who they are and where they get the money from, and you are either supporting it or not. Its as simple as that, really. Anything else is just white-wash and self-justification for a decision that you are choosing to make, as an adult.

Which is fun.Simon (not likely for much longer) NUFC

No chance this is getting published in the mailbox (MC thats what you think!) but I thought I would write in with some views on the Newcastle takeover (still wont believe it is real until I see Amanda Staveley riding a camel round the pitch, burned too many times where takeovers are concerned) and the Twitter storm and moral outcry from various media outlets and football supporters over the last few days.

Ill caveat the below by saying the below is not a dig at Football365 specifically, love the site and have been a reader for many years. Your content is a lot more balanced than most where morality is concerned and is always thought provoking even if I dont always agree with it.

Personally, Im delighted that Mike Ashley looks to be on his way out and the club is being taken over by investors with a lot of resources and will hopefully make the club competitive again. All I want is a club I can enjoy supporting and does its best to try and win the competitions it enters which for me (Jeff) is the entire point of sport. If you arent trying to win why bother competing?

So, what about the nature of the potential new owners and their backgrounds. The alleged murder of a journalist, human rights abuses, the war in Yemen etc.

Honestly, I really couldnt give a shit and most NUFC fans probably dont either. Same as I dont care that my smartphone parts are made in China, my clothes are probably made in a sweatshop in Bangladesh, my car runs on petrol from the Middle East, animals are killed to feed me every day and my online shopping gets delivered by Amazon. Call that morally repugnant if you will, I prefer to think I live in the real world, where no one is perfect, I care about family and myself first, most other things a distant second and we all have to put up with things we dont like because thats life. I also think if it really came down to brass tacks the vast majority of people would be honest enough to admit they are exactly the same. Sure, there will be exceptions to that rule, good for you, Im honest enough to admit to myself Im not one of those people.

Now to the various pieces by journalists and media outlets saying how terrible it is that such a regime should become involved in Newcastle United and it shouldnt happen, its sports washing, etc etc. My response would be let he who is without sin cast the first stone. Your employers are part owned by Saudi Arabia, you all use a smartphone and laptop, your websites are covered in betting adverts. You make a living commenting on the Premier League, that bastion of good moral standing, and youll all be covering the World Cup in Qatar in 2022. For a lot of you, your country and mine (the UK) has done worse things over the last 300 years of colonialism, slavery, wars in the Middle East etc than Saudi Arabia has ever done.

But thats just whataboutery Whataboutery is what hypocrites use to deflect from their hypocrisy. If it is of such importance to the sport then use the position of influence you have and do something about it. Stop buying goods and services from companies that are considered morally questionable, stop showing betting adverts, fight for the rules on ownership to be changed, dont write about the Premier League, dont cover the 2022 World Cup etc etc. Campaign against it, encourage others to do the same and practice what you preach. You certainly have a greater ability to affect the football world than a regular fan does.

But thats not my responsibility, Im just doing my job or its different in my situation, I have a career to think about etc will be the response.

Its easy to criticise but responsibility and choice start with the individual. If you dont take responsibility for yourself and your choices then dont complain about being called a hypocrite and try to deflect. Or be honest enough with yourself to admit that you might think these things are bad but if they meant making a change, or doing something difficult that puts you out then they suddenly become a bit less bad and you arent really as bothered about it as you might say. Youve always got a choice and whilst some are much harder to make than others they are still a choice.

In summary, walk the walk if you are going to talk to the talk or be honest with yourself that you wont and lets all get back to what we enjoy which is football not the circus that surrounds it.Dave, Washington

I cried todayI cried today. I watched the video obiturary for Norman Hunter onThe Guardianwebsite and the moment Hunter, interviewed just last year, looking healthy, determined and resolute said in my lifetime Id like to see us back in the Premiership . That was me calling for the Kleenex.

He would have, too. If only you can fill in the rest yourselves. He died from the virus, and Leeds United have not claimed the prize because of the virus. Its a bastard.

Im a Chelsea fan, but I can reel off the names of that magnificent Leeds side as easily as my Chelsea heroes. Im still in shock that we beat them in the FA Cup Replay in 1970. He didnt just bite yer leg that was conceit from a journalist in the Yorkshire Post which stuck. He had the skill, the intelligence and a left foot to astonish you.

Its been a tough week with Hunter and Peter Bonetti both passing in the same week.

Fuck.Steve, Los Angeles

Bias of commentatorsDear F365,

Ben (Wales for the foreseeable future) made a good attempt to argue that most accusations of bias against journalists or commentators are most likely due to knee jerks and one eyed partiality. But sometimes

Opening day of last season, Wolves against Everton, live on BT Sport. Steve McManaman, apparently not realising his microphone was still on, said to someone with him, I dont like Wolves. Believe me, Steve, in all your commentaries since, youve done nothing to disprove that confession.

Keep safe,Paul Quinton, Wolves

Ermcan someone send Ben stuck in Wales a link of Martin Samuel latest nonsense. Or a link to mediawatch will do.

Open your eyes Ben.Ginger Pirlo

World XI challengeI found that World XI challenge surprisingly difficult, heres my attempt;

GK: Oliver Kahn Germany (Karlsruher/Bayern)DC: Paolo Maldini Italy (AC Milan)DC: Toby AlderwiereldBelgium (Ajax/Atletico/Southampton/Spurs)DC: Sergio Ramos Spain (Sevilla/Real Madrid)CM: Roy Keane Ireland (Cobh/Forest/Man Utd/Celtic)CM: Gilberto Silva Brazil (At. Minero/Arsenal/Panikanithos)AM: Pavel Nedved Czech Rep (Sparta Prague/Lazio/Juventus)AM: Lionel Messi Argentina (Barcelona)AM: Steven Gerrard England (Liverpool)CF:Didier Drogba Ivory Coast (Marseille/Chelsea/a f**k tonne of others)CF: Edison Cavani Uruguay (Palermo/Napoli/PSG)Nill Ryan

Just seen Shane in Kilkennys world XI in fridays mailbox.

Hes picked Roy Keane and John Terry.

Everyone knows they both played for Forest.

Unlucky son.Al (Wolves)

Dutch strikersTo help Cheesom from Nigeria with his striker conundrum perhaps well keep the fullbacks Brazilian and add a few Dutch strikers

Van Nisterlrooy, Van Basten, Bergkamp, Van Persie and Cryuff.TX Bill (witty comments quarantined at present) EFC

Im sure this has been thought of butHi,

So, Ive been thinking about how to handle the end of this season and I will admit that Im a Liverpool supporter so have a bias.

One thing that I feel should be getting more coverage and Im surprised it hasnt been is that this season should just continue as and when it can be and should just finish whenever it can. The way to do this would be to cancel the 2020/2021 league season to allow for this season to continue whenever this current apocalypse ends. This way promotions / relegations happen as normal but carry over to next next season.

The cup competitions could also continue as well. Next season there could be shortened timelines for the cup competitions potentially due to the lack of league action. This would have benefits in that the cup competitions would be reinvigorated as they would be the major honours. Also, this might allow England players a bit of a break / time to practice as a team ahead of euro 2020 so we have a half decent chance in the tournament assuming we all dont live a mad max lifestyle by then.

Anyway, as I say Im sure this has been mentioned countless times but I needed to say it out loud to someone and my wife doesnt give a f*ck.

ThanksRob

The F365 Show is on hiatus until the football returns.Subscribe nowready for its glorious comeback. In the meantime, listen to the latest episode of Planet Footballs 2000s podcast,The Broken Metatarsal.

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Neville was spot on, Newcastle United, whataboutery and... - Football365.com

Queen Victoria And Prince Albert: What Was Their Relationship Like? – BBC History Magazine

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My dearest dearest dear Albert and his excessive love and affection gave me feelings of heavenly love and happiness, I never could have hoped to have felt before, wrote Queen Victoria of her wedding night. His beauty, his sweetness and gentleness Oh! This was the happiest day of my life, she continued ecstatically. Coming from a woman who, from the moment she had ascended the throne in 1837, had resisted all attempts to force her into wedlock despite some of Europes most eligible bachelors being paraded before her it was clear that marriage to Albert was borne out of love rather than duty.

Albert was Prince of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, in the present-day states of Bavaria and Thuringia in Germany. He was also Victorias first cousin, son of her mothers brother, Ernest I, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. Despite being delivered by the same midwife within three months of each other, the pair had had little contact as children, yet each knew of their familys desire to see them married one day.

A brief encounter at celebrations for Victorias 17th birthday in 1836 had planted the seeds of an attraction between the pair. She writes passionately in her diary of Alberts beautiful nose and sweet mouth with fine teeth as well as the charm of his countenance, which she describes as being full of goodness and sweetness, and very clever and intelligent. But Albert, unused to the late nights and whirl of fashionable gaieties of the English court was forced to leave several balls early, feeling sleepy and faint, leaving his lively young cousin to dance on into the night.

Albert was one of several suitors introduced to Victoria in the months before she turned 18 and inherited the throne from her uncle William IV, bringing to an end more than 120 years of male Hanoverian rule. Another first cousin, Prince Augustus of Saxe-Coburg, made a favourable impression on the young princess, more so than Princes William and Alexander of Orange whom Victoria described as being very plain.

By 1839, Victoria was relishing the relative freedom of being an unmarried young queen and once again declared herself reluctant to marry. But in October 1839, Albert visited England again. This time, Victoria was smitten.

It was with some emotion that I beheld Albert who is beautiful, she scribbled in her diary that night. Just five days later, on 15 October, in accordance with royal protocol, Victoria proposed, exclaiming: Oh! to feel I was, and am, loved by such an Angel as Albert, was too great delight to describe! he is perfection; perfection in every way.

The marriage ceremony, which took place on 10 February 1840 in the Chapel Royal at St Jamess, was everything a royal wedding should be. Dressed in a white satin gown with lace veil, a wreath of orange blossom, and attended by 12 bridesmaids, Victoria married her Albert.

Victoria fell pregnant almost immediately, giving birth to their first child, Princess Victoria, nine months after the wedding. The future Edward VII (Bertie) was born the following year. The physical attraction between the pair never faded and, between 1840 and 1857, Victoria gave birth to nine children.

However, Victoria was not a natural mother. Her own childhood had been an unhappy one, kept in seclusion at Kensington Palace by her own domineering mother with little in the way of companionship or affection. The death of Victorias father when she was just eight months old had a profound impact and the only male influence she had had as a child was that of her mothers despised advisor Sir John Conroy. I had led a very unhappy life as a child had no scope for my very violent feelings of affection and did not know what a happy domestic life was, admitted Victoria in later life

Albert, too, had suffered an unhappy childhood. His father had been a serial philanderer who paid little attention to either of his sons. Alberts mother, Princess Louise, had been forced into exile following an affair and the breakdown of her marriage, and Albert had grown up determined to be the type of father he had never had.

Grandmother of Europe

Victoria and Albert were rulers of a vast empire that dominated global politics by the end of the 19th century. It included Australia, Canada, the Indian subcontinent and much of Africa. Extending British influence and keeping allegiances closer to home in Europe was an equally important, albeit more delicate matter, and was achieved through marriage. Victoria and Alberts nine children married into royal houses across Europe from Denmark to Russia and Victoria was eventually grandmother to 40 grandchildren. Eight of these would eventually sit on the thrones of Britain, Prussia, Greece, Romania, Russia, Norway, Sweden and Spain.

George V of Britain, Tsarina Alexandra of Russia (wife of Tsar Nicholas II) and Germanys Kaiser Wilhelm the three warring royals of World War I were actually all grandchildren of Victoria and Albert. During her lifetime, Victoria had successfully managed the difficult relationships between her grandchildren and their respective nations, but after her death in 1901, peace faltered and Europe began to edge closer to war. Kaiser Wilhelm is reported to have remarked that had Victoria still been alive, World War I may never have broken out she simply would not have allowed her relatives to wage war with one another.

But Victoria and Albert shared more than just their children and grandchildren across the royal dynasties of Europe. They also introduced a devastating genetic condition. Victoria is believed to have been a carrier of haemophilia a hereditary condition that affects the bloods ability to clot. The couples eighth child, Leopold, was a haemophiliac and died aged 30 after a minor fall triggered a cerebral haemorrhage. Two of the couples five daughters Alice and Beatrice are confirmed carriers and unknowingly passed the disorder to the royal families of Spain, Germany and Russia.

Victoria and Albert were united in their desire to create a model, loving family that would set an example to the world. But neither were quite sure how to do it. Victoria hated being pregnant and found babies equally repugnant. An ugly baby is a very nasty object; the prettiest are frightful when undressed as long as they have their big body and little limbs and that terrible froglike action. Breastfeeding, too, was deemed a repulsive act and a wet nurse was employed for all of her nine children, allowing Victoria more time to devote herself to matters of state, and to her beloved Albert.

Their children were spoilt and lavished with every describable luxury from birth, yet expected to adhere to their parents ideals of a model family. Countless works of art depicting royal domestic bliss are testament to the public relations campaign Albert sold to the world.

Behind closed doors, however, royal relationships were often strained none more so than that of Victoria and Albert.

Albert was not a popular choice of husband for Victoria with the British public. He had come to the marriage an impoverished and relatively low-standing prince, despite his royal connections. And he was German to boot. He comes to take for better or for worse / Englands fat queen and Englands fatter purse were two lines from a popular, if insulting, song of the day.

The traditional sum of 50,000 as an allowance for the consort of a monarch was reduced to 30,000 for Albert by Robert Peels Conservative party the smallest sum ever to be offered. He was refused both a peerage and a seat in the House of Lords a mixture of anti-German sentiment and an attempt to limit Alberts political power. In fact, it was not until 1857 that Albert was finally granted the title of Prince Consort.

As a champion of the rights of workers, improvements in social welfare, education, the abolition of slavery, as well as a patron of the arts and technology, Albert must have been bitterly disappointed not to have had a bigger say in government affairs.

With his wife distracted by regal duties and himself lacking a formal role, it was Albert, then, who initially took on much of the responsibility for the upbringing of their children. But from the start he wanted more.

The difficulty in filling my place with the proper dignity is that I am only the husband, not the master in the house, Albert is said to have uttered to his university friend William von Lowenstein. And he was right. Albert entered a royal household that was governed by his wife and run by her former governess, Baroness Lehzen.

But within a couple of months of the wedding, Victoria reluctantly began to hand some of her official duties over to Albert as she was forced by continued pregnancies to take more of a backseat. Privately, he became her most trusted advisor and the pair worked side by side attending to royal business.

Albert was Victorias rock and she looked up to him as her intellectual superior, encouraging his ideas. But although she was happy to share power with her husband within reason Victoria had a strong sense of her own hereditary right and resented having to hand over her powers while restricted by childbirth.

The issue of sharing power was a constant thorn in the marriage. Albert was an accomplished polymath with deep interests in the arts, science and new technologies of the day. He used his influence as Victorias husband to further some of his passions, adding President of the Society for the Extinction of Slavery and Chancellor of Cambridge University to his titles. He was the driving force behind the Great Exhibition of 1851, which shone a light on British engineering and technology, and was a staunch promoter of British manufacturing.

But behind closed doors, the carefully crafted public image of the perfect family was showing signs of strain. Locked in an endless power struggle, terrible rows broke out between the lovers. For his part, Albert was terrified of Victorias violent outbursts, fearing that she had inherited the madness of her grandfather George III, whose near 60-year reign was peppered with periods of mental ill health. Advised by the royal doctor not to argue with his wife in case his fears proved true, Albert was forced to communicate during her periods of rage by means of handwritten notes meekly posted under her door.

After Alberts death, Victoria fell into a deep depression and mourned her husband for the rest of her long life. But, as the decades passed, she did find solace in the company and friendships of several men.

One notably close relationship was with her servant John Brown, the hard-drinking, bearded son of a Scottish crofter. The controversial friendship between queen and servant caused great rifts in the royal family, and Browns influence over Victoria was much criticised. Some have speculated that the relationship was more than platonic with a supposed deathbed confession from Scottish clergyman Norman Macleod that he had married the pair.

Victorias passion for India and her longing for Albert saw her strike up an intimate friendship with another servant, 24-yearold Abdul Karim, a young Indian man who had arrived in England for Victorias Golden Jubilee in 1887 to wait on tables and attend the Indian princes in residence for the celebrations. Arriving as he did some four years after John Browns death, Karim instantly charmed the Queen. Within a year, he had become Victorias teacher, instructing her in Urdu and Indian affairs, introducing her to curry and, like Brown, becoming one of her closest confidants. Lavished with gifts and promotions, Karim became even more hated by the royal family than Brown. After Victorias death, her eldest son, Bertie, ordered all records of their relationship, including correspondence and photographs, to be destroyed.

The couples eldest son Bertie, the future Edward VII, also caused tension within the family and was something of a disappointment to his parents. Neither gifted intellectually nor especially handsome his own mother described him as having a painfully small and narrow head, those immense features and total want of chin Bertie rebelled against his parents grand expectations for him. The young prince devoted himself to a life of pleasure and, when word of their sons tryst with a lady of easy virtue reached his parents ears, Albert took it upon himself to meet with his wayward son to deal with his reckless behaviour before it became public knowledge. It would be the last time father and son would ever meet feverish, racked with pain in his legs and wet through from their long walk in the rain, Albert returned to Windsor where, just weeks later, he died. He was aged just 42.

Victoria never fully recovered from Alberts death. For the rest of her life, she dressed in black and appeared infrequently in public. She surrounded herself with memorabilia to remind her of her beloved husband, taking his dressing gown to bed with her each night and continuing to have hot water for shaving brought up on a daily basis, as it had been when he was alive.

Albert had been everything to Victoria confidant, husband, lover, closest advisor and his death dealt a devastating blow to the Queen and the British monarchy. After his death, Victoria papered over the cracks in their marriage, memorialising her husband as an almost saintly figure. In a letter written 15 months after Alberts death, Victoria wrote: The poor Queen can only hope never to live to old age but be allowed to rejoin her beloved great and loyal husband before many years elapse. It was a wish that would be denied her.

Charlotte Hodgman is the editor of BBC History Revealed magazine

This article was first published in the June 2017 edition of BBC History Revealed

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Queen Victoria And Prince Albert: What Was Their Relationship Like? - BBC History Magazine

What if we find we rather like this working from home thing? – ComputerWeekly.com

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As current events are showing, a lot more of us can work much more of the time from home than we actually do. We are even getting the occasional head-scratch as people realise how much more they are able to get done without having to go to internal meetings. Plus the inevitable bean-counters are wondering whether they need to be paying for quite this many acres of cubicle space. All of which brings to the surface of the mind the thought: well, why didnt we do this sooner?

The answer, according to economists, is the coordination problem. The insight hey, much of economics is really just giving fancy names to what we notice people do is that how you or I do things depends to a large extent on how everyone else does them. There is no point in my inscribing this on vellum if the editor wants an email if the world works on left-thread screws, then little point in setting up as a right-thread hole maker.

The classic example here is which side of the road to drive on. There is no particular reason for left or right and one-third of the world does it the other way to two-thirds. But within any area, it is important that everyone adopts the same rule. It is indeed a joke that we are going to change, with the lorries starting a week before the cars.

Its even true that, as time passes, places have changed over. Sweden did in 1969 international travel between the Nordic frozen wastelands was growing sufficiently to make the Swedes habit of driving on the left inconvenient. And that they generally used left-hand drive cars to do so wasnt a good idea either, so they changed (on 3 September, for completists).

Patterns of work, both practices and hours, are an area where the eggheads have noted that coordination problems matter. Factory working does depend on everyone being there at the same time, so the regimentation of working time was imposed as the industrial society grew in importance. It is very much less true of office work that we are dependent on the output of the person in the next cubicle for our own ability to start our task. Nothing here is entirely so, of course this is tendencies we are talking about, not absolutes.

As our society has become very much more services-oriented thats now some 80% of GDP, while manufacturing is a rump of perhaps 10% of it the idea of nine to five should have become very much less important. True, there are continuing experiments with flexi-working, while more of us are shuffling into the commuter train only three or four days a week. We have also had that burst of technologies that make the process easier. Broadband, the PC itself, cheap telecoms they are the basics. There are layers of tech on top of that, Skype, Zoom, Slack, and so on, that aid.

Yet a dispassionate observer might say that given the capabilities here, we are using them much less than we could be. Much more of the economy could be done at more of a distance with less travelling and personal presence, than is. The reason why is that coordination problem. Partly we are simply set in our ways, this is how we do things, partly this is how everyone else does them and weve got to fit in, got to coordinate with them.

The proof that more use could be made of home, or distance, working is all around us these very weeks. The economy is smaller than it was before lockdown started, certainly it is. But its not as much smaller as it would be if there hadnt been some substitution of remote working for that in the collective location.

There has been some research on how far we are from what might be optimal not-office working. One piece claims that 37% of all jobs can plausibly be done at home. It is actually much more than that, because that doesnt include any of the work done in the home, or about the home, but which is unpaid. But still, we are obviously a long way from 37% of all jobs, those that can be done at home, being done at home.

So, why is this so? One answer is that what can be done at home is not necessarily optimally done there and this is, of course, true. It is true in part at least. But also it is true that some portion of this is not done domestically simply because we have not done it that way so far. Our coordination solution doesnt break that way. And, as above, we a're entirely certain that our technological ability to be doing this out of the office has increased in recent years, more than the practice itself has spread.

This brings us to what coronavirus might do for us. By smashing the previous coordination solution, we enable the growth of a new one. One perhaps more in tune with our technological capabilities and without having the problem of coordinating everyone over from the old to the new. We dont, as the Swedes did, have to plan every road and route, rather the absence of the old solution allows the growth of a new one informed by what we have been doing this past few weeks.

This has, after all, happened before. True slavery died in England with the Norman Conquest of the Saxons. Their feudal system of villeinage met its final end with the Black Death, after which the shortage of labour led to the demand for wages and the freedom of contract. It is important to note that the new system is not necessarily an improvement. Exactly the same stimuli, the passing of one-third of the working population, led in Central and Eastern Europe for reasons still argued about - to the imposition of the much stricter system of serfdom rather than money wage labour.

The coordination of the actions of millions of people is difficult. When a stasis has been achieved, it is difficult to change and, as historical observation tells us, a crisis that disrupts that previous system can allow the growth of a new one more in tune with technological and societal capabilities.

I would expect there to be, in the post-Covid-19 economy, much more home working, perhaps part time and part in the office, than we had at the beginning of this year. Not because our technology has suddenly leapt forward, but because we have now had a taste of how the new way might work and, who knows, we might even like it.

As to who will really benefit from this, my bet would be on the chimney pot pub. We humans are, after all, primarily social beings and once we are not getting our gossip at the water cooler, something will have to take its place. Why not that ancient grand hub of a British community, the pub on the corner?

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What if we find we rather like this working from home thing? - ComputerWeekly.com

COVID-19 and Welfare Queens – Boston Review

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Linda Taylor in 1944. Image: Washington State Archive, Puget Sound.

Conservatives have long been sounding the alarm about undeserving people receiving public assistance. These fears have deep ties to racism and the policing of black womens bodies.

The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth

Josh Levin

In the original Republican version of the CARES Act, the $2 trillion dollar stimulus package that will give most Americans $1,200, poor families were supposed to get just half the financial assistance that middle-class families received. The act that passed did not contain this provision, but the fact that it was proposed at all is telling. Many Republicans believe that low-income individuals are undeserving of aidand so resistant to work that financial assistance in the midst of a pandemic might incentivize them to stay unemployed. And, as legal scholar Mehrsa Baradaran has pointed out, the final version of the act still deems many people undeserving: those who work in the adult entertainment industry, for instance, are ineligible for stimulus money, and individuals with felony convictions cannot receive small business loans. None of this is terribly surprising. Indeed, Donald Trump has been trying to gut social programs for years. Just months ago, he proposed a budget that included staggering cuts to food stamps, Medicaid, and housing assistance. A federal judge recently put a stop to a Trump administration plan to kick 700,000 Americans off of food stamps in the midst of the pandemic.

Many Republicans believe that low-income individuals are undeserving of aidand so resistant to work that financial assistance in the midst of a pandemic might incentivize them to stay unemployed.

Motivating this antipathy toward welfare is Trumps (and conservatives) belief in a number of stereotypes about those who receive public assistance. Trump has suggested that welfare discourage[s] able-bodied adults from working, invoking the longstanding myth that people are impoverished because of lack of motivation and merit, and that they rely on public assistance out of laziness. This myth is rich with racial antipathy, drawing on stereotypes linking black people and laziness that date back to slavery, and which were later also connected with poor immigrants. In each generation, these stereotypes have taken on an incarnation suiting the Zeitgeist. In the 1930s, the Chicago Tribune decried unscrupulous parasites profiting from Depression relief, and likely had in mind both black Americans and southern European immigrants, whose status as white was not yet secure. In 1976 it was articulated memorably by Ronald Reagan, who claimed welfare fraud was so rampant that one woman in Chicago had fifteen telephone numbers, thirty addresses, and eighty names, which she used to bilk the system for $150,000 a year. The media at the time dubbed this womana black woman named Linda Taylorthe welfare queen, and the anecdote subsequently became a crowd favorite for Reagan, his go-to justification for his efforts to decimate public assistance.

The process by which public sentiment turned against welfare correlates with how the public imagined the stereotypical welfare recipient. When the program was created in the 1930s, amidst economic catastrophe, it was praised. Historian Premilla Nadasen has noted that it remained broadly popular until the 1960s, when a greater proportion of black women started receiving benefits. By the early 1970s, as journalist Josh Levin has written, news coverage and government reports framed public aid as an explicitly racial issue. By the mid-70s, Levin continues, almost 85percent of Americans believed that too many people on welfare cheat. This summation is not only racist and inaccurate, but misunderstands the structural forces that result in the exclusion of so many people from the labor market, effectively forcing them to rely on public assistance.

Scholars have shown that the welfare queen label is overwhelming used to indicate black women, and that the use of the term leads members of the public to support cuts to welfare. Yet contrary to the pernicious welfare queen stereotype, black people have never been a majority of welfare recipients, and welfare fraud is exceedingly uncommon. In fact, the welfare system has always been more likely to illegally deny benefits to those who fit the criteria than benefits-seekers are to commit fraud.

Taylor was first arrested not for welfare fraud, but because authorities suspected her of being sexually promiscuous.

Given how pervasive the trope of the welfare queen remains, its worth examining its origin in the public shaming of Linda Taylor. Levins The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth, is the first full-scale effort to present Taylors biography. Levin found that Taylor was indeed a welfare cheatbut also a serial scam artist, a kidnapper, and perhaps even a murderer. She really did drive a Cadillac, use multiple identities, and drape herself in fur coats. But, as all this reveals, she was also about as far from a typical welfare recipient as it is possible to be, a fact that Reagan elided and that Levin takes pains to emphasize.

Levin seeks to contextualize Taylors life, in an attempt to make some sense of her often bizarre, sometimes violent, constantly mendacious behavior. The daughter of a white mother and black father, she was born in 1926 in Golddust, Tennessee, where her parentage constituted a crime. Christened Martha Louise White, her impoverished white family excluded her because she could not pass for white, and she was expelled from her first school at the age of six. By fourteen, shed given birth to her first child. While still a teenager, she fled the Jim Crow South and followed the wartime labor boom to the West Coast. For the rest of her life, she moved continuously, changed her name constantly, and committed a truly astounding number of crimesfrom stealing babies from hospitals to possibly hiring a hitman to kill one of her husbands.

In the fall of 1974, the Chicago Tribune ran a story about welfare fraud, citing Taylor as an extreme example. Thousands of newspapers across the country reprinted versions of this story, many focusing on Taylor herself, with some branding her a welfare queen. She was indicted for welfare fraud, though for just $7,608 worth of payments; Cook County spent far more securing a conviction than shed allegedly stolen. Her case led Illinois to aggressively pursue, prosecute, and punish welfare cheats, and, in 1976, it led Reagana longtime foe of welfareto tell a stunned crowd about this woman from Chicago.

Levins book, widely praised, is impressive in its dedication to nuance and proper context. That said, The Queen misses a critical contributor to Taylors decades of social exclusion: she was a victim of something called the American Plan. Understanding the American Plan and its legacy not only adds critical context to Taylors life, but also helps explains the lives of so many other midcentury women, particularly women of color, who were excluded from the labor market and forced to rely on public assistance and underground economies.

As Levin recounts, Taylor was first arrested not for welfare fraud, but because authorities suspected her of being sexually promiscuous. In January 1943, when she was sixteen or seventeen years old, Taylor was arrested for disorderly conduct in Seattle; in October 1944, she was arrested a few miles west of Seattle for vagrancy; and the next month, the Seattle police again booked her for disorderly conduct. Levin notes that the formal charges in all three arrests were euphemisms, part of an expansive statute used to detain those suspected of lewd or undesirable behavior, passed by authorities seeking to control VD [venereal disease] by controlling women. In the weeks following her first 1943 arrest, Taylor was denied bail and forced to report to the health department for a VD test. Taylor was forced to undergo more VD tests after her other arrests. In April 1946, she was again arrested on vague morals charges, largely because the police suspected she might be infected with a venereal disease, this time in Oakland, California.

While Levin correctly describes how this carceral regime was widespread in and around Seattle and Oakland during the mid-1940s, he does not connect it to a nationwide system of social control. As I wrote in my book, from the 1910s through the 1950s (even into the 1970s in some areas), government officials across the United States detained tens of thousands of women (and virtually no men) on suspicion of promiscuity. These women were forcibly examined for VD, and then incarcerated if found to be infected. They were locked in what some called concentration campsfilthy, claustrophobic penal institutions where they were treated for VD with poisonous mercury- and arsenic-based drugs. This set of loosely connected local, state, and federal statutes, which reached all the way to the U.S. territories of Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and the Dominican Republic, were referred to by officials at the time as the American Plan. It was already in place decades before Taylor was first arrested, and it continued for decades after.

The welfare queen label is overwhelming used to indicate black women, and use of the term leads the public to support cuts to welfare.

Women detained under the American Planand women arrested for morals offenses more broadly, including disorderly conduct, vagrancy, waywardness, and prostitutionoften had remarkable difficulty getting a job. Community members and potential employers well understood the meaning of their arrests and shunned them. This exclusion from the labor market often pushed women into more dangerous jobs, such as selling sex or defying prohibition and anti-gambling laws. Perversely, authorities often required women to hold down jobs as a condition of their release, so many women who could not do so were forced to flee or hide from parole officers, making it even more difficult to find legal work. Other penal institutions paroled women (especially black women) into domestic positions, where wealthy white women would police their conduct and behavior, a situation so stifling that many fled and sought livelihoods in underground economies instead.

Levin does point out that, in spite of the thriving war industry job market in Oakland, Taylor didnt derive much benefit from the Bay Areas wartime economic boom. But he attributes this to her lack of formal schooling and to anti-black racism. Both of these factors may have prevented Taylor from securing certain jobs, but its worth noting that a dearth of academic qualifications hardly mattered for the vast majority of war industry positions, and, as Levin notes, no official records issued in California labeled her a Negro, instead identifying Taylor as both white and Mexican. But exclusion from the labor market was a quintessential result of detention under the American Plan.

Understanding this gendered system of policing, then, is crucial for making sense of how Taylor came to be the stereotypical welfare queen. While her choices were uniquely her own, the circumstances that pushed Taylor into the illicit economy were sadly far from unique. They are the same reasons that hundreds of thousands of Americans cannot secure stable employmentand have nothing to do with motivation or ability.

While the laws that led to Taylors early incarcerations are largely gone, the U.S. labor market unfortunately continues to sadistically penalize people for their incarceration historya practice that disproportionately harms people of color. More than a dozen states still allow employers to consider job applicants criminal history. This is to say nothing of other factors that might exacerbate the struggle to find employment, such as immigration status and the decimation of unions. And this will all, of course, be worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic, which will put many out-of-work low-wage workers in competition both with each other and with more conventionally qualified candidates. A history of incarceration, a challenge in the best of times, may now be in effect an immediate disqualification for finding employment.

A full accounting of the story of Linda Taylorand the welfare queen mythmust make clear that so many individuals are forced to rely on public assistance because of inequities baked into U.S. policing and capitalism. Even a true, one-in-a-million scam artist like Taylor was, to a large extent, forced into such a life by forces beyond her control.

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COVID-19 and Welfare Queens - Boston Review

Travel with your taste buds recipes from around the world by Britain’s top chefs – Telegraph.co.uk

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From zingy chilli crabs in the Caribbean to creamy coconut curries in Kolkata, top chefs share their favourite dishes from around the globe to transport us to far-flung places.

Three years ago I visited Sardinia with a boyfriend, Luca, for Sa Sartiglia, Oristanos Mardi Gras festival, complete with medieval horse racing, drinking and eating. Oristano is one of Sardinias great medieval cities, with cobbled streets and balconies blowsy with bougainvillea. During Sa Sartiglia the equivalent of the Palio horse race in Siena the city-centre piazza shuts down and it becomes the course. Riders get dressed up in elaborate costumes with white masks, bells and silk, and do acrobatics on the horses.

Lucas family home was a stream of friends and family, the TV blaring out live coverage of the race, though it was happening less than 100 yards away there was too much eating to be done to leave the house. There was a table spread with suckling pig, roast lamb and chicken (all from the family farm), rag, ravioli, bread, olives and grilled aubergines. The viola aubergines in Sardinia are enormous and beautiful, and you taste the sun when you eat them.

Serves four to six as an antipasti

Ingredients

80g pine nuts

3 large aubergines, sliced cm thick

handful of mint, chopped

80g feta or ricotta salata

For the dressing

1 tbsp balsamic vinegar

1 tbsp date molasses

1 garlic clove, minced

2 tbsp lemon juice

zest of half a lemon, grated

5 tbsp best-quality olive oil

pinch of chilli akes

Method

Preheat the oven to 170C/Gas 3.

Toast the pine nuts on a baking sheet for a few minutes, until golden.

In a griddle pan over a medium heat, grill the aubergines in batches until they have softened, making sure they take a good amount of colour on each side.

Arrange on a platter and sprinkle over the mint, the nuts and the ricotta/feta. Mix the ingredients for the dressing together, whisk well, then drizzle over the top.

Bitter Honey: Recipes and Stories from the Island of Sardinia by Letitia Clark (Hardie Grant) is out on April 30

My fondest travel memories are from childhood holidays in south Devon. Pottering about in the rock pools on Salcombe beach, seeing bright sea anemones and crabs for the first time, and using our little nets to catch fresh shrimps by the bucketload, which my parents would cook up for tea.

We stayed in the picturesque village of Newton Ferrers. At low tide we could walk right across the causeway to Noss Mayo, all the boats keeled over in the mud. It was and still is very beautiful, a largely untouched landscape on the estuary of the River Yealm where you can see herons, kingfishers and egrets.

My father had a 19ft sailing boat and we would go mackerel fishing with a long line and flies on the string. Any mackerel dish I make still takes me back to these memories of Devon.

To make a great ceviche, coarsely chop 200g mackerel and marinate in lime juice and zest, 20ml olive oil, half a teaspoon of caster sugar, a teaspoon of chopped coriander, a pinch of chili flakes, salt, a teaspoon of finely chopped shallot and a little chopped garlic. Serve with tartar sauce (make your own by adding chopped gherkins, capers, parsley and shallots to mayonnaise).

Muse by Tom Aikens, 38 Groom Place, London SW1 (musebytomaikens.co.uk)

After checking into Soho House Barcelona one Friday last spring, my boyfriend and I headed to the bar for pre-dinner drinks, where we were immersed in the young vibrant energy. We ordered chilled manzanilla (Spanish crisp dry white sherry) with a platter of green olives, almonds and Iberico ham simple Spanish bar food, but it was fantastic, so much so that it has become our ritual aperitif during lockdown.

Early the next morning we visited La Boqueria, a buzzing market with jaw-dropping displays of fresh fish, cured meats, spices, cheeses, vegetables and an extraordinary array of beans. We called at Bar Pinotxo for brunch its the oldest bar in the market, a small counter seating only about 12 people, and the food is sensational and incredibly good value.

We ate lightly smoked sardine fillets, chickpeas with black pudding, slow-cooked beef cheeks and squid with Santa Pau beans (a local bean similar to borlotti). All accompanied by an ice-cold local beer! Inspired, we hit the stalls, and I bought an array of fabulous spices and oils including saffron to recreate a fish dish when I got home for a taste-escape back to this magical place.

Serves four

Ingredients

Olive oil

800g white fish (ling, haddock, hake or whiting), cut into small pieces

1 onion, finely chopped

3 cloves of garlic, crushed

1 tin of cherry tomatoes

2 tbsp whole almonds, finely chopped

a good pinch of saffron, soaked with warm water

300ml white wine

2 tbsp fresh flat parsley, finely chopped

sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Method

Pre-heat the oven to 180C/Gas 4.

Add a tablespoon of olive oil to a frying pan over a medium heat, then add the fish, season and cook for 30 seconds on each side. Transfer to a casserole dish.

Add another tablespoon of olive oil to the pan and stir in the onions and garlic, cover and cook for two to three minutes. Then stir in the tomatoes. Season and cook for a further five minutes and transfer to the casserole dish with the fish, almonds, and the saffron and water, plus white wine and one glass of water.

Cook in the oven for 30 minutes, then stir in the parsley and serve with basmati rice or a big green salad and lemon wedges.

Try more recipes in Clodaghs Suppers or get daily inspiration on IGTV @clodagh_mckenna

King prawns in malai curry sauce is a perfect holiday dish. It transports me to Kolkata, one of my favourite places in the world. Usually reserved for special occasions, it takes me back to when I worked at The Oberoi Grand hotel and the Bijoya celebrations between the Durga Puja and Kali Puja festivals. Malai refers to the creamy, tender meat inside a young coconut.

Serves two

Ingredients

400g large freshwater prawns, peeled and deveined

1 tsp ground turmeric

1 tsp salt

2 bay leaves

3 red onions, blended to a fine paste

1 tbsp ground cumin

2 tbsp ginger and garlic paste

2 green chillies, slit lengthways

250ml shellfish stock

75ml coconut milk

tsp sugar

4-5 green cardamom pods, ground

1 tbsp coriander, chopped

juice of lime

Method

Marinate the prawns in turmeric and salt for five minutes. Saut the bay leaves and onion paste in vegetable oil over a medium heat for 10 to 12 minutes. Meanwhile, sear the prawns in oil for a minute on each side.

Mix turmeric, ground cumin and ginger-garlic paste in 75ml water, add to the sauted onions, and cook gently for two to three minutes, stirring.

Add the remaining salt, green chillies and prawns and stir for a minute.

Add the stock, then mix in the coconut milk and simmer for two or three minutes, adding more stock if necessary.

Season and sprinkle on the ground cardamom and chopped coriander.

Squeeze over the lime juice and serve with basmati rice.

From Spice at Home by Vivek Singh (Absolute Press, 25); cinnamonclub.com

On my first trip to the Philippines with my wife, Irha, she took me straight to Caf Laguna in Cebu, where shes from. Its a popular local restaurant thats always packed. I had eaten Philippine adobo before, in Dubai but the adobo at Laguna was the best Id ever had. It makes such a difference eating a national dish in its place of origin.

Afterwards I had to go to my mother-in-laws house to taste the family recipe. Initially, I was worried: what if I didnt like her mothers version as much? Thankfully it was amazing, and Irhas mother taught me how to cook it. Now we enjoy this recipe as a family at home and it always brings back memories of that astonishing trip.

Pollen Street Social, London W1 (pollenstreetsocial.com)

In this region of Spain, on the Portuguese border, the black pigs roam semi-wild, feasting on acorns before they become exquisite iberico pork. From the pigs, they also make sausages and the most amazing smoked paprika, garlic and cumin-spiked chorizos. I tried it while I was there, grilled over open flames (there may be nothing better than that smell for grabbing attention at a gathering), alongside roasted peppers. Its the finest chorizo Ive found, made even better by the cooling saffron aioli.

Serves four

Ingredients

350g soft, spicy cooking chorizo (about six sausages), peeled

1 large red bell pepper

1 large yellow bell pepper

1 garlic clove, finely chopped

1 tsp thyme leaves

50ml extra virgin olive oil

50ml white balsamic vinegar

2 pinches of saffron strands, infused in a splash of warm water

sea salt and black pepper

200ml aioli or olive oil mayonnaise, to serve

Method

Light the barbecue or use a hot griddle pan.

Put the peppers on the grill and blacken all sides.

Transfer the peppers to the indirect heat zone, and cook for 20 minutes.

Put in a heatproof bowl and cover with cling film.

Leave to steam for 15 minutes, then deseed and peel off the skins. Roughly slice, then put in a bowl with the garlic, thyme, extra virgin olive oil, vinegar and seasoning. Marinate for 15 minutes.

Cut the chorizo in half lengthways, place on the grill and cook for two minutes on each side until lightly charred and cooked through.

Whisk the saffron-infused water into the aioli/mayonnaise.

Spoon the marinated peppers on to the plates and serve with the chorizo and a dollop of aioli.

Norma, 8 Charlotte Street, London W1 (normalondon.com)

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Travel with your taste buds recipes from around the world by Britain's top chefs - Telegraph.co.uk

WTTC thanks all those in the travel & tourism sector – Arabian Industry

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As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to rattle the world and its travel & tourism industry, the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) has thanked all those in the sector going the extra mile to support their communities through these challenging times.

WTTC president & CEO Gloria Guevara said: WTTC wants to pay tribute to the millions of amazing coronavirus heroes throughout the global travel & tourism sector for selflessly going the extra mile to help their communities to overcome and combat the Covid-19 pandemic threat.

We recognise their quiet heroism and phenomenal dedication through using their incredible people skills developed during their normal working lives and wealth of experience to step up and offer essential help and assistance to those on the front line fighting this terrible virus.

Guevara concluded: Whether its tending to the sick, opening hotels for health workers or manning foodbanks, they, like countless others have risen to the challenge and shown with their hearts and actions that we are stronger together and we will win this battle.

WTTC highlighted a number of initiatives around the globe, including furloughed airline crew being deployed to help in hospitals, to operating additional cargo flights and hotels opening their doors to accommodate frontline staff.

The Council also noted that hospitality groups such as Hilton have been working to provide up to a million healthcare professionals with free accommodation.

In March and April, WTTC has called on world governments to support the travel & tourism industry, projected to lose up 75 million jobs if nothing is done. According to WTTCS 2020 Economic Impact Report, during 2019, the sector supported one in 10 jobs (330 million), making a 10.3% contribution to global GDP and generating one in four of all new jobs.

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WTTC thanks all those in the travel & tourism sector - Arabian Industry

Gudrid Thorbjarnardttir the woman who found the New World 500 years before Columbus – The Guardian

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Passport detailsGudrid Thorbjarnardttir, AKA Gudrid the Far-Travelled, New World explorer.

Place and date of birthIceland, sometime in the late ninth century but you should never ask a Viking woman her age.

Claim to fameGudrid was as well-travelled as her nickname suggests, visiting Norway, Greenland and, later in life, making a pilgrimage to Rome. What makes her truly exceptional, though, is that she sailed to North America in a longship, beating Christopher Columbus to the New World by almost 500 years. According to the accounts recorded in the Saga of Erik the Red and the Saga of the Greenlanders, Gudrid lived in America (known to the Vikings as Vinland) for three years. Her son Snorri was the first European to be born there.

Supporting documentationIts an almost unimaginable feat of derring-do, considering the hazards and the available technology, but there are pretty good reasons to believe that it stacks up. Since the 1960s archaeological evidence has emerged to confirm the Vinland sagas extraordinary accounts of a precocious Norse expedition to the New World. The remains of a settlement were discovered at LAnse aux Meadows, on the northern tip of Newfoundland, with typical Viking characteristics and preserved artefacts. Remnants of a spindle used for spinning yarn support the idea that a woman was among the would-be settlers.

Distinguishing marksSadly, Gudrid will never come to life for us in the way later, better-documented explorers do. However, the glimpses we get from the two sagas suggest Gudrid was not only resourceful but a compassionate traveller, who deserves to be better-known.

Last sightedThe Viking settlement in America was abandoned after three years. Gudrid returned to Iceland, where she ran a farm, and eventually converted to Christianity. In her sunset years, she went on a pilgrimage to Rome

Intrepidness ratingConsidering the era, the challenges, the risks, her gender and the cultural norms of the time, Gudrids a 10 out of 10.

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Gudrid Thorbjarnardttir the woman who found the New World 500 years before Columbus - The Guardian

Three cataclysmic events have changed travel forever this will be the fourth – Telegraph.co.uk

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Like a plane, cruising at 30,000 feet, the travel industry is a robust thing, though its not immune to a bit of turbulence.

The wobbles come from a myriad of sources. High-profile aviation disasters, like the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in 2014, can affect consumer confidence in flying. Civil wars, such as the ongoing one in Syria, can take destinations off the travel map for years or decades. Natural disasters, like the eruption of Eyjafjallajkull in Iceland in 2010, can bring air traffic in an entire continent to a stand-still.

But the travel industry has a way of levelling its wings and carrying on, largely due to the simple fact that we, as a species, do love a good holiday. Not long after air disasters, we board planes without fear. Over time, wars end and destinations are redrawn onto the travel map (Croatia, Vietnam, Rwanda, to give a few recent examples). Ash clouds dissipate. And onwards the travel industry goes.

Prior to the pandemic, more people than ever before were going on holiday there were 1.4 billion tourist arrivals in 2018, up 6 per cent on the previous year. Travel and tourism accounted for 319 million jobs worldwide and generated $8.8 trillion to the global economy, according to the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC).

So yes, the travel industry is a behemoth, but this means that when a catastrophic global event causes it to fall to its knees, the earth tremors. And when the travel industry rises again, the way we go on holiday tends to look rather different to how it did before.

In the last 100 years there have been three cataclysmic moments for travel: World War Two, 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis. With swathes of the world on lockdown, borders closed and global air capacity down 65 per cent an event IATAs CEO Alaexandre de Juniac has described as aviations gravest crisis the coronavirus pandemic will undoubtedly be looked back on as the fourth major event in the history of modern travel.

Nobody knows how coronavirus will change the world, and the way we travel across it in the years to come. To make an educated guess, we must look back at the times when travel has been grounded before.

Commercial travel, which was still in its relative infancy at the time, came to a halt for large parts of the world between 1939 and 1945, though this was not the thing that shook up travel and tourism in the years that followed.

Through the history of aviation, military aircraft and engines have always paved the way and commercial aviation has swiftly followed in the slipstream. In the late Thirties and early Forties, Britain and Germany scrambled to develop the jet engine; the first ever fighter jet, the German Messerschmitt Me 262, took flight in 1940 and the British Gloster Meteor made its first flight in 1943.

In the years after the war ended, all of the major powers were developing jet engine technology, and we were soon boarding jetliners to far-flung places. The first commercial jetliner was the British de Havilland Comet, developed at Hatfield Aerodrome in Hertfordshire, which entered service in 1952. However, after three high-profile disasters, another model, the Boeing 707, took its place and became the market leader.

And so the jet set was born, and a new, slightly odd phenomenon that humans had never felt before was also born: jet lag. In the decades after, aviation boomed and has become affordable for the masses, to the point where 39 million flights took off in 2019. Theres an argument the Jet Age would have happened, at some point, anyway. Whats almost certain, however, is that the technological advancements made during World War Two made it happen sooner.

When two aircraft flew into the World Trade Centre in New York City, one flew into the Pentagon, and United Flight 93 was hijacked and brought down southeast of Pittsburgh, all of the 4,000 planes flying above American airspace were ordered to land as soon as possible. Civilian air traffic wouldnt resume for another three days, although the impact the 9/11 attacks had on air travel, globally, lives on to this day.

Its easy to forget just how much aviation security has changed since that day. Prior to the event, security checks did exist in some countries rolled out after a series of aircraft hijackings in the Sixties and Seventies although they were nothing compared to what we go through now.

Today we have to remove our shoes and belts at security, only bring liquids of 100ml or less on board, and in some airports are required to go through full body X-Ray scanning machines to detect anything hidden beneath our clothing. Frisking is a perfectly normal experience in airports, these days. Understandably, some of the worlds tightest checks are now in the US, where the Transportation Security Administration, born in the wake of 9/11, has since spent $56.8 billion on aviation security.

When the financial crisis hit in 20072008, many industries were ravaged as the world entered a global recession travel was no exception. The immediate impact was that people around the world tightened their purse strings; we delayed or cancelled our holiday plans and companies cut corporate spending on things like business travel.

With this new mindset, in the wake of the crisis travellers became more frugal and focused on experiences rather than lavish material goods. So the desire to travel resumed, and the stage was set for a little disruptor called Airbnb to launch in late 2008. Holiday lettings existed before Airbnb, of course, but largely offline and certainly not grouped together on one platform. By 2017, Airbnb was bigger than the worlds top five hotel firms combined, and today has over five million online listings and makes $2.6 billion in gross bookings. Following its lead, a number of digitally led start-ups were born in the wake of the financial crisis and continue to disrupt the travel market just look at how Uber, Monzo and Whatsapp have changed the way we travel, spend and communicate on holidays.

Another trend following the financial crisis was the boom of the outbound traveller from emerging markets. In 1997, people from developing countries made up 21 per cent of international travel arrivals. By 2009 that was 31 per cent. In just five years after the financial crash, by 2014 the number was up to 41 per cent. We can view the financial crash perhaps not as the cause, but certainly as the catalyst for accelerated change in the travel industry in the last decade.

Few industries have been hit as harder, and faster, by the coronavirus pandemic than travel. The scale is quite tough to comprehend, and makes sad reading for anyone in the industry: the WTTC predicts a global loss of 75 million jobs and over $2 trillion in revenue. We are seeing this happen in real time. On April 2, British Airways suspended over 30,000 of its staff, the same day that Heathrow closed a runway. From agents to independent guidebook publishers, and indeed the behemoths like Lonely Planet too, travel businesses face a very difficult time ahead.

Julia Lo Bue-Said, CEO of The Advantage Travel Partnership, told the Telegraph: We are now beginning to realise that travel is no longer the right of the fortunate but a luxury to be protected and celebrated. We have had to stop and appreciate what its like to leave our homes freely, let alone jump on a plane for a spontaneous weekend break to Madrid.

Once we begin the slow re-entry into normal life we will be changed travellers with different priorities. Whilst there will no doubt be a desire to travel in many of us, we will, I suspect, remain cautious and our choices will be influenced by different factors.

So what big changes could we be looking at, once the pandemic ends and the world gets back to normal?

One area that is ripe for disruption is business travel. Companies around the world are being forced into new ways of digital working and conferencing, and after months of working this way processes will surely get sleeker and become the new normal. After the pandemic, many businesses will be looking for ways to cut costs without losing staff; will there be any justification for a 2,000 return business class flight from London to New York to attend a meeting or conference, in the post-Covid world?

The cruise industry could be one of the hardest hit areas of travel. Early on in the crisis, the Diamond Princess ship had the highest number of coronavirus cases outside of China, culminating in 712 passengers testing positive and 11 deaths. More recently, the MS Zaandem has been stranded off the shores of Florida after struggling to find anywhere else to dock in South America, with 9 confirmed cases on board and 2 deaths. These stories will likely linger in the memory for anyone tempted to book a cruise holiday in the coming months and years.

Aviation will also take a big hit. Some, like easyJet, have grounded their entire fleet while others continue with minimal services.According to air travel analyst OAG, global air capacity has now fallen to 37.8m seats a remarkable 65pc fall since the start of January. As a result, Southwest has become the world's biggest airline. While Flybe was, sadly, the first to collapse as a result of coronavirus in early March. There are concerns that with low cash supplies, many airlines won't survive if the world remains in lockdown for many more months;Iata has warned of mass insolvencies should the grounding persist beyond May.

One likely change will be the change in how we approachhygiene on our travels. In the same way that 9/11 led to a new era of security processes, it is plausible that cruises and airlines will introduce more stringent processes to ensure passengers are healthy and doing everything they can to prevent the spread of disease. Is it ridiculous to imagine all air passengers will have their temperatures checked before boarding a flight, as is currently happening on arrival in many airports, and either refused boarding or put in a particular seat on the plane if they are unwell? Emirates has already started testing passengers before boarding flights and we may well see more follow suit. EasyJet has also announced this it could resume flights with the middle seats taken out of action. One thing for sure is that we will be seeing a lot more face masks and hand sanitizers on our travels from now on.

We could well see some other behavioural shifts, after coronavirus. With millions of holidaymakers having to cancel plans and request refunds for trips booked long in advance, could we see a rise in last-minute holidays? Quite possibly. And with stories of so many people stranded overseas, I also wouldnt be surprised if we saw a rise in close-to-home holidays after this is all over, with people still skittish about the possibility of a sudden return of coronavirus. More likely these will be short-term shifts, as people adjust to normality and grow in confidence over time. Whether we'll be booking with Airbnb, or not, is another question Laurence Dodds writes that the once-triumphant start-up is now fighting for its life and even if it survives the pandemic, it may not have a place in what comes next.

Travellers who do go overseas will need to check their insurance policy closely, as many companies have redrawn their terms and conditions in the wake of coronavirus, coming with more limitations about what is covered in future pandemics. "Covid-19 has turned the industry on its head," said PK Rao, president of insurance company INF Visitor Care. "There will be major changes pertaining to the underwriting and policies written for travel plans."

Are there any positive changes afoot? The big immediate one is the positiveenvironmental impact of coronavirus. In the last three months, pollution and greenhouse gas emissions have fallen across the world as countries enter lockdown and transport grinds to a halt. Satellite images have shown nitrogen dioxide emissions fading away over Italy, Spain and parts of the UK since the countries entered lockdown. Many people who were reducing flying, such as one of our journalists, didnt realise it would be quite so easy.

The question of whether this pause in emissions were seeing now will last comes down to whether we will keep travelling, and particularly flying, at the scale we did before coronavirus, or if the whole ordeal will shift our behaviours and actually keep us closer to home.

It seems fanciful to imagine a world with decreased appetite for flying. However, a 2018 study from Zurich University found that when people were unable to drive, but were given a free e-bike instead, they drove much less when they eventually got the car back. A similar study from Kyoto University found that when a motorway closed, forcing drivers to use public transport, the same thing happened committed drivers soon became dedicated public transport users.

We have been stripped of the luxury of flying, or indeed catching trains or driving off on a road trip, and are being forced to find other sources of inspiration and escapism. Rather than yearning for a far-away beach, many are yearning for simpler pleasures like pub gardens and visits to see our beloved families. So could we see a drop in appetite for international travel, as we take our proverbial e-bikes to the pub garden?

It seems unlikely. While we may see a slow-down in bookings into 2021, as coronavirus looms large in the memory, and domestic travel will cut muster in the short term, I have no doubt that we will continue travelling the wider world in time. The resuming of air traffic may not be the best news from an environmental standpoint, although it will be welcomed by the millions of families around the world whose livelihoods are dependent on tourism, and will bring great relief to those economies that rely on the tourist dollar.

We will fly off to exotic climes one day, soon enough. But if history is anything to go by, we will be looking down on a very different world.

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Three cataclysmic events have changed travel forever this will be the fourth - Telegraph.co.uk